Mother Teresa showed young Buddhist who Jesus is

An article by Junno Arocho Esteves from the website of the Catholic News Service,  2nd Sept, 2016

VATICAN CITY (CNS) - A personal encounter with Mother Teresa and her work serving the poor and the dying led a young Japanese man on a journey of faith and conversion.

“I was born into a Buddhist family; I didn’t know about Jesus, Christianity, Catholicism or anything,” Missionaries of Charity Father Francisco Akihiro told Catholic News Service Sept. 2. “But I saw in a very visible way how Jesus works through the example of Mother Teresa.” 

The Japanese priest was one of countless Missionaries of Charity in Rome for the canonization of Blessed Teresa of Kolkata Sept. 4.

Accompanied by Missionaries of Charity Father Jayanthi Tatapudi of India, Father Akihiro visited an exhibition on the life of Mother Teresa held at Rome’s LUMSA University, one of many events offered to pilgrims before the canonization Mass at St. Peter’s Square.

The portraits and candid shots of the little nun embracing young children and comforting the dying was all too familiar for Father Akihiro. He first met Mother Teresa while working at Nirmal Hriday, the hospice established by her in the heart of Kolkata.

As a young Buddhist volunteer, Father Akihiro told CNS he was struck by her simplicity and closeness to those who helped her in serving the sick and the dying.

“She was small and the feeling (I had) when I met her was like meeting a grandmother,” he said. “Usually, when you want to meet somebody famous, they are in the front and hard to reach. But I was always impressed about how she would approach us, she would come to us.”

The patients who came to the house, he continued, were not only hungry and thirsty, but also lonely. However, in their weakness and in their poverty, “we saw something that radiates: the poverty of Christ. We understood this and (realized that) we are also receiving from them,” he said.

Those people who “carried a burden or suffering” were special targets of Mother Teresa’s affection, Father Akihiro noted.

She “would run to the poor, the handicapped people; that left an impression on me. And the many volunteers who saw this would cry,” Father Akihiro said.

He converted to Catholicism and went on to become a priest, leaving his home in Japan; he now lives and works in northern India to serve the poor as Mother Teresa did.

The canonization of the woman who inspired his vocation, he said, is an “opportunity for the world to come to know more about the poor and overcoming indifference.”

“Mother often said that people -- more than listening -- want to see examples,” he said. Through events like the canonization and the exhibition on her life, “people can now more easily understand how we can love, especially the poor people; how we can serve them through the example of Mother Teresa,” Father Akihiro said.

Official logo for the Canonisation of Mother Teresa of Calcutta

This article from Mumbai is on the AsiaNews website:

A graphic designer from Mahim, a Mumbai neighborhood has created the official logo of the canonization of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, which will take place at the Vatican next September 4th.

Karen Vaswani nee D’Lima is a Roman Catholic from the parish of Our Lady of Victories in Mahim. She started her carrier as a graphic designer 21 years ago and in addition to her professional work, puts her talents at the service of many parishes in the city, everything “for the Glory of God,” according to the spirit of Mother Teresa.

“I never met Mother Teresa in person - she told AsiaNews - but I always admired her work and was often involved in charity work, lending my professional experience”.

The woman is married to Sindhi Ishwar Vaswani (Ishwar means “God”); they have a teenage daughter named Kimaya ( “Divine” in Sanskrit).

Speaking to AsiaNews, Karen explained “The Archdiocese of Calcutta has contacted me and asked me to design the logo for the celebrations of the canonization of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Sister Prema, the superior general of the Missionaries of Charity and Fr Brian Kolodiejchuk, the postulator, loved it, so they decided to adopt it for international use. I am very excited and full of gratitude for that”.

Karen took three days to create the logo of Mother Teresa. “The theme given by the Vatican – she explains - was ‘’Carrier of Gods tender and merciful love”. So I decided to work on a classic pose of Mother Teresa, where she holds a baby in her arms with loving kindness”.

“I preferred to use very simple style of graphics and only two colors, so all media at all levels, can use it with ease”, she added.

Karen reveals that she prayed before, during and after work: “First of all, I thanked God for giving me this opportunity; then I prayed for the grace and guidance to create a logo that was simple and powerful, which speaks for itself”.

Mother Teresa’s “Dark Night”

What did it mean for her? What does it mean for us? 

Ralph Martin over at RENEWAL MINISTRIES has a wonderful article on Mother Teresa'a agony of soul. I share it with you because it might be helpful in the struggles many Christian people experience at the present time. 

Even though the main lines of Mother Teresa’s experience of “darkness” had been known for several years, the full publication of her private letters drew world-wide media coverage. (Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta” Edited and with Commentary by Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C.) 

TIME Magazine did a cover story on it. Prominent articles appeared in the NY Times and other major publications. There were many TV and radio interviews. 

Some secularists chose to interpret her talk of darkness as a sign of hypocrisy and even accused her of not really believing in God. Only a very superficial and partial reading of these letters could have occasioned this interpretation. Some believers were disturbed and confused to hear of her prolonged experience of aridity or emptiness in her relationship with God. Some thought the letters were so disturbing it was a mistake to publish them. This last concern, while understandable, is unfounded, since the letters in question are part of the official record compiled in the process of canonization and are generally made public. And by now we must know that efforts to “edit” the life or writings of a saint (as the sisters of Therese of Lisieux tried to do in the case of their sister’s writings), only detract from the awesome witness to holiness that is found, albeit in sometimes unexpected and disturbing ways. I think we will see that in the long run this widespread media attention, even with its imperfections, and the publication of these letters, will bear great fruit. 

Having read the entire book, which includes all the available letters and the sensitive and expert commentary of a priest from Mother Teresa’s own order, I am left awe-struck at the depth of Mother Teresa’s holiness. Her faith and her heroic service were more profound than I ever imagined. 

It is certainly true that while receiving remarkable communications from the Lord and deep spiritual/sensible consolation at the beginning of her mission, for almost 50 years Mother Teresa was left almost totally bereft of such consolation. She carried out her mission with almost no affective experience of God’s love and presence. She could see the fruit that her work was producing. She could see that when she spoke to her sisters and others that they came alive and grew in the experience of God’s love, but she herself for the most part felt only emptiness. 

During the first ten years of this “darkness” she was deeply troubled by it . . . Go HERE for the whole article.

Hitchens called Mother Teresa "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud," but her Order is praying for him

NEW DELHI (AFP) - India's Missionaries of Charity order said it would pray for British writer Christopher Hitchens' soul, despite his aggressive campaign against its Nobel prize-winning founder, Mother Teresa.

"We will pray for him and for his family," spokeswoman Sister Christie told AFP on Friday, upon hearing of Hitchens' death at the age of 62 after a battle against cancer of the oesophagus.

Asked whether Hitchens, an avowed atheist, would welcome such prayers, she declined to comment.

The iconoclastic Hitchens, who enjoyed great success as a columnist, was among the strongest critics of Roman Catholic saint-in-waiting Mother Teresa, calling her "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud".

In his 1995 book "The Missionary Position" and a 1994 documentary called "Hell's Angel", Hitchens accused the nun of being a political opportunist who struck friendships with dictators and corrupt financiers in exchange for donations to her order.

Go HERE to read the rest of this article from THE WEST AUSTRALIAN.

Do you know Him?

Whatever our particular tradition as Christians, it is so easy to reduce the Faith to a philosophy, a theology, a morality or a vague "spirituality." That's why we need evangelists; thats why we need "renewal."

No one understood this better than Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997). During Holy Week 1993 (on Lady Day, 25th March) Mother Teresa wrote to all the family of the Missionaries of Charity from Varanasi “Such a personal letter,” she said at the beginning, “that I wished to write it by hand.” In it, she says:

“I worry some of you still have not really met Jesus - one to one - you and Jesus alone. We may spend time in chapel - but have you seen with the eyes of your soul how He looks at you with love? Do you really know the living Jesus - not from books but from being with Him in your heart? Have you heard the loving words He speaks to you? . . . Never give up this every day intimate contact with Jesus as a real living person - not just as an idea.” [Read the whole letter HERE]

Later on, Mother Teresa wrote:

“Who is Jesus for me?

Jesus is the word to be spoken,

the Life to be lived,

the Love to be loved,

the Joy to be shared,

the Sacrifice to be offered,

the Peace to be given,

the Bread of life to be eaten”

(quoted in Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Fruitful Branch on the Vine, Jesus.)

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St Paul said: “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”

Philippians 3:8

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In 2004, Cardinal Ratzinger made the same point:

“Many people perceive Christianity as something institutional rather than as an encounter with Christ, which explains why they don’t see it as a source of joy. If we stay with this impression, we do not live the essence of Christianity, which is an ever new encounter, an event thanks to which we can encounter the God who speaks to us, who approaches us, who befriends us. It is critical to come to this fundamental point of a personal encounter with God, who also today makes himself present, and who is contemporary. If one finds this essential centre, one also understands all the other things. But if this encounter is not realized, which touches the heart, all the rest remains like a weight, almost like something absurd. We need to understand Christianity in a personal way, from the point of view of an encounterwith Christ.”

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And this is the testimony of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh (1914-2003):

I met Christ as a Person at a moment when I needed him in order to live, and at a moment when I was not in search of him. I was found; I did not find him. I was a teenager then. Life had been difficult in the early years and now it had of a sudden become easier. All the years when life had been hard I had found it natural, if not easy, to fight; but when life became easy and happy I was faced quite unexpectedly with a problem: I could not accept aimless happiness. Hardships and suffering had to be overcome, there was something beyond them. Happiness seemed to be stale if it had no further meaning. As it often happens when you are young and when you act with passion, bent to possess either everything or nothing, I decided that I would give myself a year to see whether life had a meaning, and if I discovered it had none I would not live beyond the year.

Months passed and no meaning appeared on the horizon. One day, it was during Lent, and I was then a member of one of the Russian youth organizations in Paris, one of our leaders came up to me and said, 'We have invited a priest to talk to you, come'. I answered with violent indignation that I would not. I had no use for Church. I did not believe in God. I did not want to waste any of my time. Then my leader explained to me that everyone who belonged to my group had reacted in exactly the same way, and if no one came we would all be put to shame because the priest had come and we would be disgraced if no one attended his talk. My leader was a wise man. He did not try to convince me that I should listen attentively to his words so that I might perhaps find truth in them: 'Don't listen,' he said. 'I don't care, but sit and be a physical presence'. That much loyalty I was prepared to give to my youth organization and that much indifference I was prepared to offer to God and to his minister. So I sat through the lecture, but it was with increasing indignation and distaste. The man who spoke to us, as I discovered later, was a great man, but I was then not capable of perceiving his greatness. I saw only a vision of Christ and of Christianity that was profoundly repulsive to me. When the lecture was over I hurried home in order to check the truth of what he had been saying. I asked my mother whether she had a book of the Gospel, because I wanted to know whether the Gospel would support the monstrous impression I had derived from this talk. I expected nothing good from my reading, so I counted the chapters of the four Gospels to be sure that I read the shortest, not to waste time unnecessarily. And thus it was the Gospel according to St Mark which I began to read.

I do not know how to tell you of what happened. I will put it quite simply and those of you who have gone through a similar experience will know what came to pass. While I was reading the beginning of St Mark's gospel, before I reached the third chapter, I became aware of a presence. I saw nothing. I heard nothing. It was no hallucination. It was a simple certainty that the Lord was standing there and that I was in the presence of him whose life I had begun to read with such revulsion and such ill-will,

This was my basic and essential meeting with the Lord. From then I knew that Christ did exist. I knew that he was thou, in other words that he was the Risen Christ. [Read MORE]

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Charles Wesley (1707-1788), in one of his best loved hymns puts it like this:

Jesus! the Name high over all,

In hell or earth or sky;

Angels and men before it fall,

And devils fear and fly.

Jesus! the Name to sinners dear,

The Name to sinners given;

It scatters all their guilty fear,

It turns their hell to heaven.

Jesus! the prisoner’s fetters breaks,

And bruises Satan’s head;

Power into strengthless souls it speaks,

And life into the dead.

O that the world might taste and see

The riches of his grace!

The arms of love that compass me

Would all the world embrace.

His only righteousness I show,

His saving grace proclaim;

’Tis all my business here below

To cry “Behold the Lamb!”

Happy, if with my latest breath

I may but gasp his Name,

Preach him to all and cry in death,

“Behold, behold the Lamb!”

If you are just starting out on your faith journey and don't have anyone you can speak to about it, send me an email, and I will make a few suggestions to help you along the way.