Wednesday, July 23, 2014
To love one’s neighbour was to love God — this was the key, not the
size of her mission or the power others perceived in her. Mother
explained it thus to her biographer: “We are called upon not to be
successful, but to be faithful.”
Mother Teresa, the
diminutive nun who straddled her century as one of its most towering
personalities, was at one level a very simple person and at another a
complex enigma. In modern management parlance, she could well be
projected as a management guru who could have presented to the world’s
best business schools her uniquely evolved model for success. With 4,000
nuns, she created a multinational enterprise of service that
encompassed 123 countries by the time she died in 1997.
She would however have rejected such a proposition because her model
was not based on material achievement, but on its spiritual quotient
that sprung from and was nurtured by her faith. It required no banks of
computers, no army of accountants, no bureaucrats. Her Order was rooted
to a unique vow of “wholehearted free service” to the abject poor and
marginalised.
As her biographer, I found there were several mysteries that lent
themselves to no easy answers. Mother Teresa was hardly qualified in
academic terms. She never went to university and her studies were
largely confined to the scriptures. And yet she set up hundreds of
schools that lifted poor children from a desolate life on the streets.
She provided a safety net for the homeless by opening feeding centres
and soup kitchens and also started Shishu Bhawans for infants her
sisters found abandoned in the streets. There were homes for the
terminally ill, so that they were not alone when they died. Not all
these centres were in the poorer parts of the world; many were in the
affluent west where loneliness and despair was a sickness she likened to
leprosy.
