Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa
Mother Teresaalso known as Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, MC, was an Albanian Roman Catholic nun and missionary. She was born in Skopje, then part of the Kosovo Vilayet in the Ottoman Empire. After having lived in Macedonia for eighteen years, she moved to Ireland and then to India, where she lived for most of her life...
NationalityAlbanian
ProfessionReligious Leader
Date of Birth26 August 1910
CitySkopje, Macedonia
CountryAlbania
love only variously everyday The meaning of love
I remember I picked up a person from the street who was nearly eaten up with maggots, and he said, I have lived like an animal, but I am going to die like an angel, loved and cared for.
Thou shall love the Lord with thy whole heart, soul, and mind. This is the commandment of the Great God, and he cannot command the impossible. Love is a fruit in season at all times and within reach of every hand. Anyone may gather it and no limit is set. Everyone can reach this love through meditation, spirit of prayer, and sacrifice by an intense inner life. There is no limit because God is love, love is God, God's love is infinite. But part is to love and to give until it hurts. That's why it is not how much you do, but how much love you put into the action.
Our life of contemplation shall retain the following characteristics: —missionary: by going out physically or in spirit in search of souls all over the universe. —contemplative: by gathering the whole universe at the very center of our hearts where the Lord of the universe abides, and allowing the pure water of divine grace to flow plentifully and unceasingly from the source itself, on the whole of his creation. —universal: by praying and contemplating with all and for all, especially with and for the spiritually poorest of the poor.
Lord, help us to see in your crucifixion and resurrection an example of how to endure and seemingly to die in the agony and conflict of daily life, so that we may live more fully and creatively. You accepted patiently and humbly the rebuffs of human life, as well as the torture of the cross. Help us to accept the pains and conflicts that come to us each day as opportunity to grow as people and become more like you-make us realize that it is only by frequent deaths of ourselves, and our self-centered desires that we can come to live more fully, only by dying with you that we can rise with you.
The mass is the spiritual food that sustains me, without which I could not get through one single day or hour in my life; in the mass we have Jesus in the appearance of bread. While in the slums we see Christ and touch him in the broken bodies, in the abandoned children.
Suffering will come, trouble will come - that's part of life; a sign that you are alive. If you have no suffering and no trouble, the devil is taking it easy. You are in his hand.
If sometimes our poor people have had to die of starvation, it is not that God didn't care for them, but because you and I didn't give, were not an instrument of love in the hands of God, to give them that bread, to give them that clothing; because we did not recognize him, when once more Christ came in distressing disguise, in the hungry man, in the lonely man, in the homeless child, and seeking for shelter.
People are hungry for God. Do you see that? Quite often we look but do not see. We are all passing through this world. We need to open our eyes and see.
As each Sister is to become a Co-Worker of Christ in the slums, each ought to understand what God and the Missionaries of Charity expect from her. Let Christ radiate and live his life in her and through her in the slums. Let the poor, seeing her, be drawn to Christ and invite him to enter their homes and their lives. Let the sick and suffering find in her a real angel of comfort and consolation. Let the little ones of the streets cling to her because she reminds them of him, the friend of the little ones.
Joy is the characteristic by which God uses us to re-make the distressing into the desired, the discarded into the creative. Joy is prayer-Joy is strength-Joy is love-Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.
Do not look for Jesus away from yourselves. He is not out there; He is in you. Keep your lamp burning, and you will recognize him.
I repeat that the poor, the sufferers from leprosy, the rejected, the alcoholics, whom we serve, are beautiful people. Many of them have wonderful personalities. The experience which we have by serving them, we must pass on to people who have not had that wonderful experience.
Without our suffering, our work would simply be social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, not part of the Redemption.