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Photo: Murali Kumar K.

FRUITS OF LABOUR Mount Carmel College in Bangalore, one of the institutions she founded

This is Mother Teresa of St. Rose of Lima, the founder of St. Teresa’s Convent, which runs the above colleges as well as has convents, schools, colleges, old-age homes, orphanages and training centres across the world in places as far away as Sudan and Argentina, in addition to over a hundred convents and allied institutions in India with a total of 821 sisters and 34 novices.

Hagiographical literature is so clichéd, it gives readers little sense of the lived experiences behind the recorded accounts. However, Mother Teresa’s life and work, like that of all saints, is a thrilling tale of courage, determined hard work and cheerful acceptance in the face of relentless poverty, suffering and loneliness.

She was a mere 29 on April 24, 1887, and only two years into the religious life of a Carmelite, when she was called upon to leave an already established mission at Aleppy and travel to Eranakulam and set up St. Teresa’s Convent. The Rev. Joseph Kelanthara aptly describes her work as “magnificent”, and the account of her accomplishments as reading “like an epic”.

Her letters provide a further glimpse: “No one would believe the utter poverty we are in. The last habit worn by Sr. Beatrice had 19 patches… I always place the sisters’ personal wants in the last place and they most cheerfully accept the arrangement, laughing and joking at one another’s patches”.

Instances of Mother Teresa’s far-sightedness are many: her emphasis on attending to the living conditions of the people came almost three quarters of a century before the Second Vatican Council’s decree on the social aspects of religious work; she began an industrial training unit in times when skill training was unheard of; she founded an asylum for unwed mothers and worked hard to aid the bringing of the Mass to prison inmates. And she did all this in the 19th century, in a brief span of 15 years, before dying in a train accident on September 13, 1902 at the age of 44.

Sister Victorine, CSST, and Superior General of St. Teresa’s says, “I see my Foundress as an empowered woman who dared risk her own life for the people she served. She had the courage to challenge the customs of her times.”

Students and teachers are also inspired; Deirdre Fernandes-Dominic, French teacher at Mount Carmel, is inspired by the fact “that she believed in education that lasts beyond the classroom...”, while Vaishali Dinakaran, a student at the same college, is inspired by the “determination to stick to her goals and what that has ultimately resulted in, for us”. Nuns like Sr. Cassilda — at 96, the oldest nun in St Teresa’s — are inspired by Mother Teresa’s “…incredible trust in the providence of God, of admirable integrity and uprightness in the midst of criticism and misunderstanding”.

(With inputs from Sister Bindu, CSST, student at Mount Carmel College)

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