Mother Teresa in the gutter
A dying man and a calling
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu has been a Loreto Sister in Calcutta for nearly twenty years when she receives, on a train to Darjeeling in September 1946, what she will call her call within a call.
She has already given her life to God. She is already a nun. What the experience on the train produces is a specific commission: leave the convent, go into the slums, serve the poorest of the poor.
She takes the name Teresa. She leaves Loreto in 1948 — which requires two years of permissions and approvals from Rome — and goes into the slums of Calcutta with five rupees and no institution behind her.
She finds a dying man in the street, lying in his own filth, being eaten by rats and ants. She brings him to a hospital. They refuse him — he is too poor, too far gone. She stays with the hospital until they accept him.
She finds a woman dying on the pavement outside a hospital. The woman is being eaten alive by rats and ants. Teresa picks her up and refuses to leave until she is admitted.
The pattern repeats until the city gives her a building — a former hostel for pilgrims — where she can bring the dying.
Nirmal Hriday. The Place of the Pure Heart.
She will run it and its sister institutions for forty-five years, giving the dying — thousands of them — a dignified death. Not a cure. A hand to hold and a face that says: you matter, you are seen, you are not alone at the end.
“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
— Mother Teresa, attributed, c. 20th century
“The King will answer them, 'Most assuredly I tell you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.'”
Teresa did not cure anyone at Nirmal Hriday. She gave the dying a place to die with dignity — a hand to hold, a clean bed, a face that communicated: you are not garbage.
The theology is Matthew 25: the person in the gutter is Christ. Not symbolically. Literally. As you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.
This means that every person Teresa picked up off the Calcutta pavement was an encounter with Christ. Not a charitable act toward a stranger. An encounter with the one she had given her life to.
Small things with great love. Not great things with great resources.
Who is in the gutter of your daily life — visible, passed over, needing a hand? And what would it mean to stop and see Christ there?