Mother Teresa’s Inspiration Felt In Atlanta

By PRISCILLA GREEAR, Staff Writer

Published: October 30, 2003

ATLANTA—When fourth-grader Joji Michael heard Mother Teresa was visiting a home for the elderly near his Catholic school in Kerla, India, he and his classmates took off, running a half mile to catch up with her.

While not an overly devout youngster, he and his friends were thrilled by the experience. When she was getting out of her car and walking toward the home, the beloved nun laid her large hands on them and said, “God bless you and study hard. Jesus loves you.”

“She really wanted to speak to us because we ran a pretty good distance. Even back then, she was pretty well known and probably the most important factor in my mind that comes up is she was a holy person, looking after the poor, the sick and the needy.”

Michael began reading his study Bible that included passages in it by Mother Teresa. He became transformed as he reflected on her message to serve the poor in love and her belief that “loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.”

Another moving passage for him focused on the importance of using one’s gifts to glorify God, “to free ourselves to be filled by God. Even God cannot fill what is full.”

Now 28 years old and a parishioner at St. Patrick’s Church, Norcross, Michael believes that God had him meet Mother Teresa for a reason, which he is still seeking.

Before her beatification, he visited the Missionaries of Charity home for women with HIV/AIDS in the Virginia Highland area of Atlanta, and he pondered anew how to

live in the nun’s spirit, whether through engineering, his profession, or through the Kerla Catholic community in Atlanta, which he serves as a choir director.

“I think the real thing is seeing each individual as God’s creation and providing a human touch, no matter whether you come across a Muslim, the poor, the needy,” he said. “I believe I should step out and do something more.”

Michael joined many others touched by Mother Teresa from around the archdiocese for a Mass held Oct. 24 at Sacred Heart Church in Atlanta, celebrating her beatification, the last step before sainthood. She was beatified in Rome by Pope John Paul II on Oct. 19 before an audience of some 300,000 pilgrims and admirers. The pope sped up the process for the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize winner who died in 1997, as normally it takes five years after death for the first step toward canonization to even be considered, and for many it occurs long after their death.

Mother Teresa was born to Albanian parents in 1910 in what is now Macedonia and became a nun serving in India; in 1946 she experienced a call to found the Missionaries of Charity and to live among the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. Always smiling, she rapidly expanded the order and opened over 500 hospices, clinics and shelters for the poor, sick, lonely and dying around the world.

Through the request of physician Dr. Sharne Sheehey, confirmed by the archbishop of Atlanta, Mother Teresa sent some of her sisters to Atlanta in 1993 to open the Gift of Grace Home and in 1995 came to bless the home and also spoke at Sacred Heart Church.

Alexa Elwell of St. Augustine Church, Covington, who attended the 1995 Mass, recalled how she and many others felt. “When you see her you feel like she’s looking right at you. That’s a saint. They look at you and right into you like a person of dignity, like she knows you.”

A statue of Mary loaned by Elwell and draped with the order’s white habit with royal blue trim, and a picture of the nun were placed before the altar. The Mass was celebrated by Msgr. R. Donald Kiernan, vicar general, and concelebrated by 11 other priests. A prayer card given to worshippers read, “You accepted His call to satiate His infinite thirst for love and souls and become a carrier of His love to the poorest of the poor. With loving trust and total surrender you fulfilled His will, witnessing to the joy of belonging totally to Him.”

Music included “Mother’s Meditation” sung by Maire Lang and David Caron with words by Mother Teresa including “Jesus you are my God. Jesus you are my spouse. Jesus my life, my love, my all in all.” Music director Billy Krape sang a solo of “Taste and See.”

Msgr. Kiernan in his homily recalled her visit to Sacred Heart and how she had offered a few words of encouragement to pilgrims on their journey. He said this Mass was time to gather anew to honor and to draw close to her in spirit. He spoke of her ordinary beginnings as Agnes Bojaxhiu in Albania where God put within her a desire to join her life intimately with Christ and “to let that love raise her normal existence into something heroic—for His sake, and for the sake of those He would choose to be led by her love.”

“It is her love that made her a champion—it is her love that made her a hero of the Church—it is her love that empowered the many individual ministries that sprang from the force of her life, from the energy of her day to day activities,” he said. “Mother Teresa understood true poverty—that from true poverty, poverty of means, poverty of ambition, poverty of self, the greatest wealth, the greatest treasure can spring forth, the unfettered love of Jesus Christ working through those who give themselves to His power.”

Her life reflects the “heroic grace which fills our Church, and which makes champions of ordinary, small, seemingly unimportant people,” he continued. “In honoring her today … we are strengthened—and the nations of the world are called to attention, to see what the power of God can accomplish through one, single, simple and humble soul.”

He called her a beacon of hope to the faithful in their struggles.

“Through all the challenges and difficulties of her mission, her faith sustained her will, moving mountains of doubt, and clearing the rough places of skepticism before the inspired momentum of her work. Her charity was never-ending. She woke each day, with but one goal in mind—to love as many as possible for the sake of Jesus Christ,” he said. “Mother Teresa became one with her Lord, with the Lord Jesus Christ. She could not have boasted of this oneness in her life, for there was no pride in her. But in death, now joined eternally to the Bridegroom of her soul, she also burns with the light of the Risen Jesus Christ.”

As details of the life of this very private woman are now coming out, he read from the first letter she wrote to her bishop in 1947 about her desire to begin an order of missionaries, where she spoke of another missionary, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, who served in the United States. “I read the life of Mother Cabrini. She did so much for the Americans because she became one of them. Why can’t I do in India what she did for America? She did not wait for souls to come to her. She went to them with her zealous workers. Why can’t I do the same for Jesus Christ here?”

Mother Teresa “received the Lord’s love and went looking—for fifty arduous years, looking for those who suffered, for those who were poor—looking for those who needed, not her, but what she had to give—the love of Jesus Christ,” Msgr. Kiernan concluded. “If we are to grasp the meaning of Mother Teresa’s life, and how through her life the meaning of Jesus Christ is revealed, we must ask the question: Why can’t I do for the Lord what she did, here, and now?”

Annie Varghese, a native of India and a member of the Kerla Catholic community, recalled that upon hearing Mother Teresa in Atlanta she was struck by her small stature and powerful aura of holiness, love and compassion. With three daughters, she feels that her witness to the dignity of forgotten outcasts is an especially powerful countercultural message for youth.

“I’m really impressed by her dedication to the unborn and to the poor, her dedication to the prayer life, how she always talks about how prayer is so important,” said Varghese, a parishioner at Corpus Christi Church, Stone Mountain.

A pediatrician, she was feeling tired that day at work when she thought of the Mass and Mother Teresa’s message. “I kept thinking about how it was such a privilege to be of service. It kept me going in my own work.”

In serving for three years with Mother Teresa at one of her homes for the sick in India, Sister Julian Paul, MC, recalled how she worked at the front door and people would always ask to see the elderly foundress. She always had time for them, the Missionary of Charity said.

“One of the things that touched me was Mother was available to everybody. I had a (job) to open the door when people came. Even though she was old and tired she never missed anybody. She had time to see everybody. So many people used to come to see Mother,” said Sister Paul, who worked and lived with Mother Teresa while in religious formation.

She also recalled feeling the presence of Jesus in Mother Teresa and how “you could look at her and see how she prayed.”

Sister Paul was grateful to celebrate with North Georgia laity the humble spirit of her foundress. That spirit remains at the Atlanta home, she said, and Mother Teresa often would tell her nuns that wherever the spirit of the order is, there she would be.

“I’m happy people have come to know more about Mother and her spirit. What Mother did is open the eyes of the people to the poor. The poor were forgotten and she opened people’s eyes.”