Mother Teresa Is Looking at You

A beaming smile — it overflows with joy and gratitude. It comes from a man on a thin mattress on the floor. He looks malnourished. And I know he’s dying because he’s at a Missionaries of Charity Home for the Dying. And yet, it’s hard not to look at his photo and long for what he has. It may be little, but it’s what matters most.

Nirmal Hriday — “Home of the Pure Heart” — was founded by Mother Teresa in 1952. The photo was taken by American photographer Michael Collopy when he visited there a year before Mother Teresa’s death, after committing himself to persistence in asking her to sit for a portrait.

“A glowing light in the darkness of the modern world,” is how Collopy thought of Mother Teresa, impacted by her long before he had the blessing of getting to know her and her Sisters. He was in high school when he first became aware of this exotic yet superhumanly simple woman, in Malcom Muggeridge’s film Something Beautiful for God. Mother Teresa “had such an impact on me that I began to try to find out more about her through books, magazines, and newspaper articles.”

A number of years later, she was in San Francisco to open a convent for Sisters in training, and Collopy successfully met her. “The brief encounter led to a greater friendship with Mother and the rest of the Sisters. It is a relationship that I have treasured and which has been very important to me in my life.”

Ten years later, he was able to show the world an intimate look at their life — one fueled by prayer in the 1996 book Works of Love are Works of Peace: Mother Teresa of Calcutta and the Missionaries of Charity, published by Ignatius Press. It’s a beautiful coffee-table book — even my copy with its beat-up paper cover wrap and dog-ears and highlighting — but it is really a prayer book. If you don’t have a stockpile of prayer books — if the meditative is not your usual jam — be not afraid. This one is as welcoming as they get — and seems to have a magnetic quality to it. It’s as if the beatitudes sent an envoy to get recruits to authentically live what Jesus talked about in the Sermon on the Mount, as documented by the Evangelist Matthew. And the photos could have been taken today. They are as relevant as ever. Because they are about the human person. One by one.

“One thing that has made a real impression on me is the interior beauty of the Indian people,” Collopy reflects, under a photo of five women on a street outside Prem Dan — the main “Gift of Love” home the Sisters have for the otherwise abandoned in Calcutta. “Even in the worst of material circumstances they are dignified and gracious. They smile easily and genuinely. They are so welcoming,” Collopy writes.

The people are, of course, the reason the book is so accessible — because they are only human. As human as Mother Teresa. As human as each and every one of us.

“I have never before in my life experienced such a profound sense of peace and joy as I have while being in the presence of Mother Teresa and the M.C. Sisters,” Collopy writes. That seems implausible given the darkness they are drawn into — the deepest of human suffering.

The charism of the Sisters draws them into situations desperate; Collopy wasn’t as prepared as he thought he would be for what he saw the first time he walked into their home for the dying. “It is the shocking smell of death, disease, excrement and decay, however, that hits me first and hardest as I walk in. Looking around, I see people experiencing real suffering. Some have gaping wounds with bones exposed,” he writes. “There is the sound of constant coughing and spitting. I keep my lips sealed as tightly as possible. Those who have died are wrapped in shrouds and taken out. Even though I am a professional photographer by trade, I find it hard to take pictures here. I pass up a lot of shots. Despite the intensity of the situation, I am struck by the pervading sense of peace that is here. And the special luminosity. A very unusual light.”

Early, he had seen Mother Teresa in her usual place, one of the many, washing her sari in a bucket on the floor like the other sisters. Humility is key, clearly. But it’s much more than that. “Seeking the face of God in everything, everyone, everywhere,” is how Mother Teresa explained it, “all the time and seeing His hand in every happening.” And, in a turn you may not have seen coming, she described this as “contemplation.” She said that “no contemplation is possible without asceticism and self-abnegation.”

Maybe that is what we are doing wrong?

“Love to be real,” she said, “it must cost — it must hurt — it must empty us of self.”

In one of the photos, I notice her eyes. I remember the one time I saw her — she was a few feet away from me at Mass. I was an undergraduate at the Catholic University of America, and she was in D.C. for the final profession of some of her Sisters. Then I noticed how small and delicate she appeared. In the book, what I notice is her eyes. She clearly sees something we don’t. She’s looking at the world — at what is in front of her — but she is seeing something more.

Well, she sees everything now. And since we can’t interview her from where she is eternally, we’ll have to stick with what she left us with: “Just one, one,” Mother Teresa said. “I never look at the masses as my responsibility. I look only at the individual. I can love only one person at a time. I can feed only one person at a time.”

“So you begin . . . I begin,” she said. “I picked up one person — maybe if I didn’t pick up that one person I wouldn’t have picked up the others.”

God gives us the honor of serving Him when we care for another. Not pity a population. Not doomscroll headlines. Focus on one human creation. And you will see so much more. Like Mother Teresa here, long before meeting the face of the Father Almighty in Heaven after her death in 1997. And we will be on that same road together for the peace that surpasses all understanding.

Note: There is a temporary exhibit based on Works of Love Are Works of Peace currently at John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, D.C. (through November 11), which includes a first-class relic from Mother Teresa. Collopy will be speaking there on September 26.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.