Mother Teresa: Holiness and The Seven Story Mountain

• St. Teresa of Calcutta was a Missionary, Mother, and Mystic, according to Kerry Walters.
• Becomming Holy, the introduction states "Jesus wants us to be holy."

Conversation with Robert Lax

• Thomas Merton recalls a conversation with poet Robert Lax in his autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain.
• Merton and Lax discussed Merton's conversion to Christianity while strolling in Greenwich Village.
• Lax asked Merton what he wanted to be, and Merton replied that he wished to be a good Catholic.
• Lax countered that Merton should want to be a saint, and when Merton asked how he could, Lax said "By wanting to."
• Merton's friend was right in declaring that the deepest desire was to develop more saintly or holy, or intimately enter relationship with God.

Mother Teresa's Desire for Holiness

• By the age of eighteen, Mother Teresa recognized her desire for holiness.
• She was known by many as the "saint of the gutters" or "saint of the slums" because of her work relating to the poor.
• From that moment forward, her aim was to live a holy life that would be pleasing to God whilst serving suffering humanity, even when God seemed absent.
• Her sanctity was so apparent that her admirers began advocating for her canonization immediately after her death on September 5, 1997.
• Pope John Paul II eventually agreed to speed up the canonization process because of his admiration for her.
• An official investigation of her life began less than two years after her death, and she was beatified in October 2003.
• Pope John Paul II said he was personally grateful to her and that she was an icon of the Good Samaritan in his homily.
• Pope Francis declared Mother Teresa a saint on September 4, 2016, and named her St. Teresa of Calcutta forever.

Mother Teresa's Physical Appearance

• Mother Teresa will always be affectionately known as Mother Teresa, the diminutive nun whose life and ministry to the poor was captured in thousands of iconic photographs.
• She was always dressed the same in the white sari with blue trim that is the habit of the Missionaries of Charity, the order Teresa founded and led for nearly a half-century.
• She also wore a blue-bordered scarf that covers her head and brow, and a small crucifix is pinned on her left shoulder, next to her heart.
• Her face was incredibly lined and she began to look older than her years as a middle-aged nun.
• Her fingers were thick and blunted from years of scrubbing floors and toilets, and her hands' wrinkled skin looked like elephant hide.
• She had small feet with toes that appeared grotesquely misshapen from decades of wearing ill-fitting and secondhand sandals.
• She was barely 4 feet, 11 inches tall.
• Over time, age and labor bent her back, making her even shorter, and she sometimes looked bent double toward the end of her life.
• Teresa's expression was alternately somber, reflective, contemplative, exhausted, and at times even angry in familiar photographs.
• Occasionally, the camera caught her smiling or joyfully laughing, and she had a wonderful smile that lit up her face and warmed the heart of whoever saw it.
• There were only a few sepia-colored photographs of Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, the girl who grew up to become the saint of the gutters, in contrast to the thousands of photographic images of her as Mother Teresa of the Missionaries of Charity.
• One photo features her posing with friends while holding an open umbrella, and another from the 1920s, taken shortly before she left home for India, shows her staring pensively at the camera.
• The youthful photos reveal that Anjezë had thick, dark hair and a high, graceful forehead, both of which disappeared forever behind a veil when she became a nun.
• She stood tall and straight despite her short stature.
• The most consistent feature was her eyes which had something penetratingly luminous about them, reflecting both sheer joy and intolerable suffering.
• One is tempted to say that they were eyes which had seen God and were alert for another glimpse of the Divine, but they were also eyes that had witnessed some of the worst suffering that can afflict human beings like disease, poverty, starvation, scorn, and indifference.

Holiness

• The soul of the girl Anjezë and the woman Mother Teresa was extremely holy if the eyes were indeed the windows of the soul.
• The world was captivated during her lifetime and continues to be spellbound today by her holiness or that living commitment to conform her human will to God's, which was the same goal that Robert Lax recommended to Thomas Merton.
• Examining Teresa's life, her works, and her spirituality teaches one how to grow into their birthright as creatures made in the likeness of God.
• It teaches to open one's eyes to see with her clarity.
• She often quoted St. Augustine, "Fill yourself first [with God], and only then will you be able to give to others," whenever people asked her what sustained her throughout her hard years of service.
• She always insisted that God's perfect will for us is that we become holy, asking divine grace to fuel our desires and efforts in that direction noting that He chose us but we also have our part to play by surrendering to that divine stirring.
• Surrendering in effect means conforming one's will to God's, such that they, like the apostle Paul, can say that Christ lives in us.
• Mother Teresa counseled her Sisters to remember that the work is not ours and we must not spoil it because that would be a great injustice to God because the work is his.
• This surrender is what the Roman Catholic priest and author Henri Nouwen often referred to as "downward mobility," the will to repudiate pride and ego in order to love God and our fellow humans.
• This ideal of selflessness is a downward movement in two senses: first, because it is a rejection of the upward mobility of economic success and worldly power, and second because it is an inward withdrawal to discern God's stirrings in our deepest core, embraced by Christian mystics such as St. Paul, St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Teresa of Avila.

Achieving Downward Mobility

• Achieving downward mobility means "Not by reading plenty of books" or "by listening to many words, but by accepting humiliations” in a prayerful and even grateful way, accepting what comes our way and letting go of any bitterness or disappointment.
• The words “I want to be holy” mean: “I will divest myself of everything that is not of God; I will divest myself and empty my heart of material things. I will renounce my own will, my inclinations, my whims, my fickleness; and I will become a generous slave to God’s will.”
• Nouwen's recommendation of downward mobility was actually inspired by a conversation he once had with Mother Teresa when he began pouring out litany of worries about his spiritual life.
• Teresa patiently listened to him for ten minutes or so, and then quietly said, “Well, when you spend one hour a day adoring your Lord and never do anything which you know is wrong...you will be fine!"
• The first step in becoming holy, according to the saint of the slums, is to will to be holy by practicing the self-emptying of downward mobility.
• Mother Teresa taught this lesson in a characteristically simple way by holding up all ten of her fingers and ticking them off one by one, and saying, “I will, I want, with God’s blessing, to be holy.”
• The route to achieving that is regular prayerful adoration of the Lord.
• The second step to holiness, profligate love, becomes a lot easier once the first step is taken.
• Emptying oneself of pride and of their me-centered addiction to instant gratification clears their spiritual vision to recognize their sisters and brothers as the lovable creatures they are.
• No longer enslaved by their egos, one is able to notice and touch the wounds of humanity, and this breaks our hearts of stone and replaces them with God's compassion.
• Thomas Merton beautifully captures the new way of looking at the world that love brings in a well-known description of an epiphany he experienced while standing on a street corner.
• Merton realized while in Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, that he loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.
• It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.
• This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud.
• He had the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate and realized what we all are as if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me.

The Third Step to Holiness

• The third step to holiness follows naturally from love, putting our love for God and our fellow humans into action, dedicating ourselves to a life of service with a commitment so strong that it stretches toward the very heavens.
• Mother Teresa puts it in a breathtakingly audacious way stating that Christ tells us to aim very high, not to be like Abraham or David or any of the saints, but to be like our heavenly Father.
• Teresa taught that the key to sustaining love in action is learning to see Christ in everyone.
• She once said that we need to see Christ in all of the disguises, be they resplendent or distressing, he wears, just as a priest sees Christ in a consecrated host.
• When we willingly undertake the works of mercy out of love for those we serve, we cleave to Christ.
• What takes most of us a lifetime (and more!) to grasp, God gave the girl Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu when she was still young.
• What her luminous eyes and calm face tell show that she had already, by the grace of God, intuited much of this even before she became a nun.
• Her self-emptying love and service grew richer as the years unfolded until she discerned, two decades after taking the habit, her true calling in life, selfish service to people of the slums and gutters.
• The trajectory of her road to holy sainthood as can be visually traced in photographs of her that span eighty years, clearly starts in her youth.

A Skopje Childhood

• The woman who once observed that there would be no need for "tanks and generals" if only people learned to see the image of God in their neighbors entered the world in a region bristling with strife.
• From the moment of her birth until she left home at the age eighteen, the life of Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, the future Teresa of Calcutta, was set against the backdrop of war.
• Anjeze was born on August 26, 1910, in the city of Skopje, Kosovo, a predominately Serbian town in the crumbling Ottoman Empire.
• Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo launched an unsuccessful bid for independence shortly before her birth, and this revolt was followed by two regional wars that resulted in a redrawing of borders that finally created an Albanian state.
• World War I erupted shortly afterward, in 1914, engulfing all of Europe in a nightmare of violence that once again destabilized the Balkans.
• Both of her parents were ethnic Albanians whom Mother Teresa remembered as being devoted to one another.
• Her mother "used to be very busy the whole day, but as soon as the evening came, she moved very quickly to get ready to meet my father.... What a tremendous, delicate love she had for him."
• Nikola, Anjezë's father, was an outspoken advocate of Albanian statehood.

Nikola's Death

• Since Skopje remained in Serbian territory after the creation of Albania, Nikola, a successful businessman as well as a city councilor, began agitating for the town's incorporation into the new nation.
• He earned the respect of many of his fellow displaced Albanians in the process, but also made some powerful political enemies.
• When he died suddenly in 1919, many people suspected he'd been poisoned by Serbian nationalists at the age of forty five.
• Nikola's widow, Drana, and her three children, Anjeze (8), Lazar (11), and Aga (15) were left destitute.
• Nikola had been a good provider, but his assets were embezzled by a business partner when he died.
• Drana struggled to keep the family together by taking in sewing and embroidery work.
• She insisted that whoever came to her door hungry would be welcome to share a meal despite the family's precarious finances.
• She taught her children "never to eat a single mouthful unless you are sharing it with others," a lesson Anjezë never forgot.
• According to Brother Lazar, Drana never allowed any of the poor people who came to her door to leave empty-handed, and she would say to keep in mind that even those who are not our blood relatives, even if they are poor, are still our brethren, when we [children] would look at her strangely.
• Mother Teresa once described her mother as a "holy woman" It's not surprising.
• Drana's commitment to hospitality for the poor sprang from her deep faith.
• Although most Albanians were either Orthodox or Muslim, the Bojaxhiu family was Roman Catholic, and daily prayers at home, regular attendance at Sacred Heart, the town's only Catholic church, and pilgrimages to holy shrines were the norm.
• Lazar occasionally grumbled about his mother's and sisters' piety by saying that they "seemed to live as much in the church as they did at home," and that they "were always involved with the choir, the religious services, and missionary topics.”
• The Bojaxhiu women were also involved in the parish choir, a natural outlet because the entire family was musically talented.
• Drana insisted that each of her children learn to play an instrument and Anjeze chose the mandolin while still a small child.
• She also had a good voice, and was one of two girls in the parish sometimes invited to sing solos during services.

Anjeze's Health

• Anjeze was the baby of the family, and like many youngest children was probably coddled more than her two older siblings.
• Her nickname was Gonxha, a play on her middle name that means "flower bud," and she was by temperament a quiet and somewhat introspective girl.
• Her shyness was less of a concern for Drana than her physical constitution because the town of Skopje is located in a valley, and a river runs through its heart.
• The thick air of hot and humid summers gave Anjeze a persistent cough that convinced Drana the child wasn't long for the world, and she also suffered from the periodic chills and fever of malaria, a chronic condition that would plague her for the rest of her life and come close to killing her when she was old and frail.
• Partly to get Anjeze out of the valley and into the cooler mountains, but mainly because of Drana's deep faith, she and her children made an annual pilgrimage to the chapel of Our Lady of the Black Mountain in the mining town of Letnica.
• Mother Teresa was convinced that the intercessions of the Madonna of Letnica accounted for her vocation in later years noting that "It was at the feet of our Lady of Letnica where I first heard the divine call... I remember the afternoon of her feast of the Assumption. I was praying with a lighted candle in my hands and singing in my heart, full of joy inside, when I took the decision to wholly devote myself to God through religious life."
• Every Feast of the Assumption, thousands of Roman Catholics still visit Letnica to venerate the Black Madonna, a four-hundred-year-old wooden Madonna at whose feet Anjezë prayed that was blackened with age even in 1928.
• Many of them walk miles to the chapel in bare feet or with pebbles in their shoes as acts of penitence, just as pilgrims did in Anjeze's day.
• Anjeze's commitment to her faith quickly grew as strong as her mother's.
• Although her real education was under the tutelage of Fr. Franjo Jambrekovic, a Croatian Jesuit assigned to Sacred Heart, she attended the state school in Skopje as a fairly good pupil.

Spiritual Development

• Fr. Jambrekovic was the girls' spiritual director who gave lectures to the parish on a number of topics, sacred as well as secular, created a parish library, and organized a club dedicated to the Virgin Mary for the parish girls.
• Jambrekovic's spiritual instruction inevitably centered on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, whose members were known as Jesuits.
• The girls were encouraged, for example, to practice the daily examination of conscience required of Jesuits, and they were also trained in the Ignatian technique of imaginatively placing themselves in different biblical scenes, an exercise aimed at helping them think less abstractly about the faith.
• It's likely that the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, found in all four Gospels, was one of them since we have no record of the scenes into which Anjeze placed herself, and given her mother's insistence on feeding hungry wayfarers.
• Anjeze went through a (fortunately) short period of judgmental primness.
• Her brother Lazar remembered that, for a time, she regularly scolded him for eating before receiving Communion.
• Helped by the gentle guidance of her mother and Fr. Jambrekovic's instruction, she discovered at quite a young age that she had a vocation to the religious life.
• Drana was alarmed that her daughter's physical frailty wasn't up to the rigors of convent life, dissuaded her.
• It's not clear if Fr. Jambrekovic likewise discouraged Anjeze. recommending that she test her sense of calling by waiting a few years..
• She grew less enthusiastic about her call, finally deciding that it had been an impulse rather than a genuine message from God despite her deep piety.
• She continued her religious instruction, her regular attendance at Mass, her participation in family prayers, and her retreats
• Anjeze may well have remained in Skopje her entire life as a wife and mother who dabbled in music and writing.
• But when she was in her mid-teens, she became enthralled by stories about serving Christ in India, relayed through letters written by Jesuit friends of Fr. Jambrekovic's who were missionaries there, and he in turn shared their letters with his congregation.
• Mother Teresa recalled that the missionaries' tales "used to give us the most beautiful descriptions about the experiences they had with the people, and especially the children, in India," finding them excitingly exotic.
• Anjeze's interest in India might also have been sparked by newspaper accounts of Mohandas Gandhi who had struggled against apartheid in South Africa before returning to his native land in 1915.
• By the time she was eighteen, the sense of vocation Anjeze had felt six years earlier returned and she felt that God was calling her to bring spiritual and material comfort to the poor in foreign lands.

Renewed Vocation

• Mother Teresa stated that she had never doubted even for a second that she had done the right thing, that it was the will of God, when looking back on her youthful rediscovery of a vocation years afterward.
• In later life, she would often point skyward when asked about why she became a nun, to express that God, not she, had determined her destiny.
• Drana tried to dissuade again when Anjezë shared the news of her vocation with her mother.
• Drana refused her consent this second time in order to test her daughter's resolve.
• Grief at losing her youngest daughter, potentially forever given the distance between India and Skopje, may also have influenced Drana in a family as close as the Bojaxhius.
• Her fear was well-founded as Anjeze's only contact for the rest of her life with her mother was through the post after leaving Skopje in 1928.
• Most letters sent by mother and daughter were held up or simply lost before arriving at their destination after the Balkans came under Soviet domination in the wake of World War II.
• But her work in India kept her too busy to travel despite Mother Teresa trying several times over the years to return to her home to visit Drana and Aga, and the restrictions of the communists would've kept her out of the country anyway.
• Drana felt significant pain at the prospect of losing a daughter after the family spent years together as she closed her door for a full twenty-four hours, and reconciled to her daughter's wish to become a missionary.
• She gave her blessing, but added the rather intimidating advice that anything short of wholehearted dedication would displease God stating, "Put your hand in his hand," she told her daughter, "and walk all alone with him."
• That she was making a bad mistake was on the mind of her brother, Lazar, who wrote her a letter to that effect, to which the family's frail "flower bud" revealed that she could give as good as she got by stating, "You think you are important, because you are an officer serving a king [Zog I of Albania] with two million subjects. But I am serving the King of the whole world. "
• Now that Anjezë was confident that her sense of vocation was genuine - Fr. Jambrekovic reassured her that the joy she felt was a sure sign of God's calling - the task was to discern what religious order of missionary nuns would best suit her talents and temperament.
• He recommended the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, an order of missionary nuns especially dedicated to educating young people.
• She lost no time in writing to the Loreto Mother Superior requesting admission as soon as she learned about them stating that she wanted to serve Jesus by one in the missions and for everything else I surrender myself completely to the good God’s Disposal.
• She received a positive reply to her letter accepted her but that said that before she could be admitted to postulancy, she had to travel to Paris for a formal interview.
• They also before they could embark for India had to be schooled in the spirituality of their order and, just as importantly, begin tutelage in English, the language not only of the Sisters of Loreto but also of most educated Indians.

A Journey of faith

• Anjeze, Drana, and Aga boarded a train for Zagreb, about eight hundred kilometers north of Skopje to say goodbyes before she accepted her place in the order of Sisters of Loreto.
• So, Anjeze spent six weeks at Loreto Abbey, located in a suburb of Dublin, taking a crash course in a language she'd never heard before.
• She applied herself and by the time she set sail for India from Dublin on December 1, 1928, she had already picked up the rudiments of English.
• Leaving home was hard for Anjeze mainly due to her three reasonings: confident that this was what God wanted of her, the sheer sense of adventure, and the destructiveness of the World War I.
• Anjeze celebrated Christmas on board with her fellow Loreto postulant and three Franciscan missionary sisters during the uneventful long voyage to India along with mourn for the leaving the childhood and family.
• “I'm leaving my dear house", forsaking friends and family for a “distant shore",she wrote, expressing some of her sorrow at sea.
• She entreated God to accept her sacrifice of departing from her loved ones, perhaps forever, and asked in return only that she be allowed to “save at least one soul.”
• The intermingling of excitement and loneliness revealed in Anjeze's verse would continue for the rest of her life.

Life in the Order

• When her ship made a stop at the Tamil city of Madras, For Anjeze, the brutality of Indian poverty, encountered for the first time, was shocking.
• She witnessed scenes of misery that rivaled any suffering she'd seen back home when she explored the of Madras with entire families homeless and jobless.
• She had begun to give up, At one point, Anjeze witnessed a Hindu funeral, and was horrified by the lines of color the dead man's mourners had painted on his face.
• It was nearly seven weeks before Anjeze and her fellow postulant arrived at the port of Calcutta in West Bengal, then and now one of the most densely populated areas in the world with initial the teeming and noisy metropolis.

The India Colony

• The India in which Anjeze would spend the rest of her life was still a British colony and the The city of Calcutta was spared combat, although there were occasional air raids that sent residents scurrying for shelter.
• Mother Teresa would find that its primary mission was and still is teaching which then was followed the the darjeeling novitate trained.
• Accordingly, the Darjeeling novitiate trained novices in the spirituality of the order as well as in pedagogical technique by requiring novices to teach in the school attached to the novitiate for two hours each day.
• At the novitiate, She eventually became fluent in both where required and by the permission of the states, (earning for a time the nickname "Bengali Teresa"), and also picked up a bit of Hindi along the way.
• Because of her devotion to Therese' of Lisieux new name she settled on sister mary to reveal ther religious vows and devotions to their patron saint to give to their identity.

A Calcutta Mission

• Teresa would be sent to Calcutta assigning the Loreto orphanage and school compound located in the neighborhood of Entally where at the that time that it was home to the despised.
• Dalits with the amount children in the The Loreto compound in which Teresa lived and worked was from 1845 which then was used by one of many schools serving over five hundred children with the help of compound of consisted to the school and The The Loreto order with the schools was to teach
• Teresa found her place and became a hard worker that took the time up to the students of the schools each day without question.
• Teresa asked herself for the place at st Teressa to serve all that of her poverty strinedden that the children had to endure at the time by that year.
• The lesson the that the love is not just a thing that one could teach and to learn but the a lesson that people needed to be loved just more or if not as more as the material they needed.
• Years earlier by planted and watered by mother drana her inspiration that if one is that could never be allone.
• On may 24 1937 Teresa took to be a sister of the order Loreto before which made her known to be the well know mother teresa today serving christ
• There is at what point she needed to take this step in the world and could have at the risk of not being in the order.

World War Two

• WII was a disrupting factor throughout all of India while for for one of India because of what the colonizers were expecting.
• Teresa made in love to god about doing and helping people as it could for god for the the most in the need.
• Because principal of The school made to work together was from the works of the long time during The war the super and ability teresa was working with with the war years and to the people.
• Before the end of this was as teresa could tell or see as a sister of Loreto but the burdens teresa was suffering with with the war years.
• On september Teresa experienced the divine call and the call of what as the day of inspiration.

The Call

• Was not what vision or a rapture but what the voice in what the absolute conviction.
• Teresa led a treat for the for her sisters to share her experience and was also taken with what the call means with the lord and food.
• teresa would had spent 60 years a about her experience on the train on may 1993. Teresa wrote she would do to with these day.
• While what remained pricate was what she had put forth for that of the interrior locataions still continues to this day in the middle of the new year. Teresa addresses lovingly as from god that wanted all to end.
• Wha is the words why with with in the mind of regularly she is from of station on earth with had help for 20 years people whom god did to call what to do.

Enduring a Broken Earth

• Was during time of hardship about the poor in of other was captured in to that depth it did provide Teresa during this moment and time.
• Teresa did make what to do in at this to did.
• One's unrest began about the 2nd world war because people start fueling hate between the city residents.
• The that time news of Indian would part into its own by the brithish gov in 1946
• By the time the was put under control, somewhere between 1000-8k on that day

Chapter three, and a great divide

• All as they to do by in was a great hard on the earth as to what and the way things should be with what teresa had done for them.
• With her great amount of power she asked to the to lie as it be to what could come would then be set and ready.
• People was that very of content to but in what could be as is her what to the earth and in doing as they do to the new country.
• As Teresa called the "absolute vision and not rapture " in what was the key to god and the church where in for as those in need that did what help people.