Just when I thought I had read everything about Mother Teresa, a new book comes out.  It is Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk’s, third book (as her postulator he knows more about Mother Teresa than almost anyone alive). Titled A Call to Mercy, the book brings us the best of his 15-year examination of both her writings and others’ testimonies about her work. Page 7 beautifully illustrates today’s Gospel of the Rich Man (“Dives”) and the Poor Man (Lazarus). For years, apparently, Dives had ignored Lazarus, the beggar at his doorstep. Now, in hell, Dives has to, himself, beg Lazarus for a drink of water. A little charity goes a long way in this life, and may save us from hell in the life of the World to Come.
 
Mother Teresa took a fourth vow, “wholehearted and free charity.” Charity must be free. Mercy must be simple, no strings attached. “People criticize us” she writes on page 7 of the new book, “because of this word free. The other day I read in one article written by a priest that charity is like a drug for the poor. … I’ve decided I will write to him and ask him: ‘why did Jesus have pity on the people?’ He must have drugged them when he fed them by the multiplication of the loaves…. He fed them first. One more question I’m going to ask him: ‘did you ever feel the hunger of the poor?’”
 
Yesterday I was heading out of town to hear confessions at another parish—to minister the very sacrament of mercy. At the corner of Octavia and Market, just before leaping into hyperspace on the 101 freeway, I stopped at the traffic light. A man stood begging for bread outside my window. I lowered the window to give him some money. “God bless you,” I said. “Oh, He does, several times a day!” the poor man beamed. “You have a beautiful joy,” I replied.
 
And then my own San Francisco Lazarus said: “I know the man upstairs”—he pointed to the sky—“will always take care of me!” This man was an angel—not in the literal sense, but a true messenger of God, just what I needed to prepare me to hear confessions. I gave that man a little money, and he gave me a treasure—he gave me faith and joy. Or rather, he allowed the good God to bless me that morning.
 
We ask the perennial question: should I give money to a homeless man, and if so, how much, and how often? Jesus told us we would never eradicate poverty (“the poor you will always have with you”). As a policy, the Missionaries of Charity do not give money to beggars. They establish homeless shelters and soup kitchens. But for those of us who cannot manage comprehensive aid to the poor, should we give them a few dollars from time to time? Are those occasional few dollars just a drug? Does it train them in bad habits? Do I do it just to soothe my own conscience?
 
The answer, it seems to me, is in today’s gospel, illuminated by our great saint, Mother Teresa. Yes, we should give to the poor, and give until it hurts. Sometimes we should give money, and sometimes we should give our time in a soup kitchen and sometimes we should undertake more comprehensive aid projects such as soup kitchens or parish organizations like St. Vincent de Paul. God will show us how. The subtitle of Fr. Brian’s book is Mother Teresa’s phrase “give your hearts to love, and your hands to serve.” First is love, then service. First the heart, then the hands. And that is what distinguished her method from government aid. She gave free and wholehearted service to the poor. Her goal was not to eradicate poverty, or even to solve the problems of even one person. Her goal was to give her heart in love to that person. If we give our hearts, God will do the rest.
 
Even if I don’t give to that man at Octavia and Market a few dollars, I will give him a smile, a thought, a prayer. He is my brother. The rich man in today’s gospel never gave Lazarus even a thought, never a smile, it seems. He just walked over him, day after day. I walk past the poor, beginning with the lonely and the frustrated in my own home, many times a day. But God always offers us another day, another chance, to give our hearts to that one person. Mother Teresa was extraordinary in giving her heart to just about everyone she met. I don’t think I can do that, but I can give my heart to one or two people a day, at least. I turn to the Mother of God to help me see the poor in my daily path, and to have the patience to give a bit of my heart to them today.

Happy Feast of St. Pio of Pietrelcina, who was born “Francesco,” the name of our Pope and the name of our City. Padre Pio famously said “when you are afflicted with some pain, don’t ask why, ask what for.” We know why—to save our souls. We don’t know specifically what for, and it sometimes helps to know for what good we are offering a particular suffering. I once had to spend a night in a homeless shelter, for example, and it taught me a new esteem for the homeless.
 
Yesterday at daily Mass we began the Book of Qoheleth with these words: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Pretty hard words….  No matter how hard we work, says Qoheleth, no matter how good we look or how many friends we have, life all adds up to nothingness. We are just dust in the wind. Jesus describes us as “useless servants.” His judgement on human life is pretty harsh, but of course we suspect it to be true.
 
Mother Teresa’s own estimation of her net worth was pretty minimal: “I have nothing and I am nobody.” This month’s National Catholic Register reprints an interview with a Time magazine journalist who chased her about Calcutta with a microphone in 1988. “Humble as you are,” he said, “it must be an extraordinary thing to be a vehicle of God’s grace in the world.” Mother Teresa replied: “But it is his work. I think God wants to show his greatness by using nothingness.” Journalist: “You are nothingness?” Mother Teresa: “I’m very sure of that.”
 
Notice how effortlessly she responds to his question. Our greatest fear, I think, is nothingness. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” the ancients said, and our greatest existential fear is to be nothing. “To be or not to be,” quoting Hamlet. “That is the question.”  We fear non-being (death), but even more terrifying is the possibility that our few decades on earth have absolutely no significance. Mother Teresa stared this horrible possibility straight in the face. She disarmed it by looking elsewhere for meaning. She looks through herself, and into herself; she looked through others and into others, to see God in these apparently meaningless husks. It is his work, she insisted. I need not, and cannot, achieve any significance of myself. But God is with us, in us, around us. He alone gives meaning to our lives. Mother Teresa thirsted for God, searching for him in every person, in every corner of creation, and she found Him. If my life seems meaningless, it simply means I’m looking in the wrong place. It means there is too much noise in my life. “See how nature—trees, flowers, grass—grows in silence,” She wrote. “See the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… in the silence of the heart God speaks.” We all know that life is too stressful, a busyness that keeps us from the core significance of life. The only thing for it is stillness, in which the vanity of our lives becomes filled with meaning, filled with the presence of God.

Mercy received and mercy given in the life of Mother Teresa

Last Sunday Pope Francis canonized Mother Teresa. He spoke of how God loved her, and how she in turn gave His tender loving kindness to others. We see saints from the outside (the love they give to others), but we don’t usually see their interior lives (the love they have first received from God). Mother Teresa gave extraordinary love because she perceived to an extraordinary degree God’s thirsting love for her. Saints are those astonishing people who see what we don’t see. God’s infinite thirst, his tender care at every moment, became visible to her over time, and so she became capable of total surrender to Him in loving trust. “There is a sort of miracle every day, some sign of God’s love and care.” Mother Teresa wrote. “Once we ran out of food because of the rains and the flood. Just that time the schools closed in Calcutta and all the bread was given to us… for two days, our poor had bread and bread, until they could eat no more. The greatest miracle is that God can work through nothings, small things like us.” Mother Teresa accomplished remarkable works for the poor in her 87 years on earth, but all of it was only the exterior fruit of her interior love for God. “It is God’s work, not ours,” she insisted. “I am only a pencil in His hand. Pray that we do not spoil God’s work.”
 
Three parables of mercy

Our readings today speak of God’s mercy, what Mother called “God’s tender love for me.” First, Moses appeals to Yahweh’s mercy. Although justice demands that he wipe out the faithless Israelites, God’s heart relents. “I will not destroy them, for I am God, not man.” St. Paul writes in the second reading : “I have been mercifully treated … I have found mercy.” And today’s Gospel gives us three parables: a woman who loses a coin, a shepherd who loses a sheep, a father who loses a son. In each of these parables, God searches for us as a person driven crazy by desirous love. The shepherd puts 99 good sheep at risk to chase after one who was dumb enough to wander off. The woman tears her house apart to find one small coin, and then spends ten times its worth to celebrate.
 
Forgiving your son

And the “Prodigal Father” spends his days scanning the horizon for the return of his “prodigal son.” This boy was no good; he had demanded his father’s money because he couldn’t wait for him to die. He wastes the family resources and wastes himself. Most of us would write a loser like that out of our lives.  But the father spends his days scanning the horizon, hoping for his return. When he sees him, “a long way off,” the Father runs out to him, clasps him to his heart, and restores his humanity, no questions asked.
 
A few years ago a young man I knew returned from Los Angeles. He had enjoyed a happy childhood and been a beloved part of our parish growing up. But at around 16 he began to resent his parents, and pierce himself, and practice senseless violence. After high school he went to LA to live the party scene for a few years. Recently he came back home. And what did he find waiting for him? Did his father run out to meet him and wrap him around with affectionate forgiveness? I won’t tell you what happened, but you can only imagine how hard—impossible, even—it would be for his father to completely forgive his son. I’m sure I could not forgive him completely, because I don’t know God’s infinite love for me yet. But I’m working on it.
 
Do you know Jesus?
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In her famous last letter to her sisters, Mother Teresa wrote these words: "My dearest Children, Jesus wants me to tell you again, how much is the love He has for each one of you—beyond all that you can imagine. 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? Ask for this grace, He is longing to give it. Never give up this daily intimate contact with Jesus as a real living Person—not just an idea.”
 
I and the rest of our parish are largely unconverted. You and I, we do not know Jesus very personally. We do not trust Him very much because we scarcely know Him. That is why we have so much trouble loving others. We do not know the love God has for us. So we must take the trouble to pray. We must set aside time every day for silence, especially before the Blessed Sacrament. The church is open to us; Jesus is thirsting for us. Our Lady will help us, and so will St. Teresa of Calcutta. It is up to us to make that time for Jesus in prayer, so we may begin to know him face to face, and so become capable of giving that love.

On our last night in Rome, we shared a homemade spaghetti dinner on the convent rooftop and talked about the Camino de Santiago. A jug of local red wine lent nostalgia to our conversation as the sun set behind St. Peter's and alpinglow reflected off the Colessum's white travertine. Soon the great bell of St. Mary Major began to ring across the street, as it does every evening, a final song to Our Lady heard by most of Rome at 9pm. We had been to Mother Teresa's canonization that morning, and most agreed that our pilgrimage finally ended with that Mass. "But really," one student said, "our pilgrimage will not end until the eternal liturgy in the life of the world to come." And she was right, and right enough that many more hard days and exhausting roads lie between us and our journey's end.

But one theme kept recurring in our final conversation on the Camino: our capacity to continue when we knew we couldn't continue. For some, the first few hours were the hardest. Martin suffered multiple blisters such that he could hardly make it to the bathroom upon waking up. "How is it possible for me to carry my pack up steep hills for the next ten hours?" he wondered. "I will have to use a cab today," he concluded. But even though he couldn't do it, he did it. Somehow God gave him the capacity. The last few hours were my hardest. Once we stumbled into a village only to learn all the beds were taken. We would have to walk another hour to the next village, hoping something there would be available. My feet were two swollen water balloons, a golfball-sized lump had developed on my shoulder under the pack strap, my strength was simply dried up, and the psychological dismay of not knowing if there would be any beds in the next village deadened me. But God put one of my feet in front of the other, and we kept going.

We began to realize that we don't actually have to finish the walk--in fact, we can't. We only had to allow God to finish the walk for us. Christ's words in Matthew 19 became wonderfully real: "for man it is impossible [referring to marriage], but not for God. For God, all things are possible." The Camino is God's, and we can only follow, only surrender to His grace. It was not easy, but it was possible. Possible, though, only for the one who in fact surrendered, taking no account of the personal sacrifice, believing only that God does not command what He does not give the grace to accomplish. By the grace of God, 15 of us hobbled into Cathedral Square on the morning of Aug 31, and a group of tourists or pilgrims, standing beside their bus, clapped. They were not clapping for us, however, since we didn't do the walk, but clapping for the Savior, who made the walk with and for us.

Pope Francis' somewhat ambiguous Latin had just declared Mother Teresa a saint in the Catholic Church. I glanced back at Fr. Pascual, my good friend who had been a good friend of hers, but I couldn't tell whether his face was streaming rivulets of tears or rivulets of sweat. "Both" he told me later, as we both bit into pieces of steaming pizza with the homeless and their beloved sisters.

Pope Francis had obligingly thrown a party in his audience hall for Rome's street people following the canonization. The sisters and some select priests had been invited, but Fr. Pascual and I had not been issued passes. At first a severe Italian guard threw me out as I tried to sneak in claiming to be "his friend," pointing to a homeless Romanian who had befriended me. That brief rejection by the authorities smarted, and I felt what the homeless feel every day as I saw everyone else happily entering the dinner. But soon enough my Roman collar got me past the guards and I was enjoying free pizza with the rest of Rome's poor. I'm writing this in one of Rome's cozy Irish pubs, with a guiness and bag of "crisps" in front of me, having paid my six euros to enjoy a place at the table. The poor had their pizza today, but no doubt are back in the streets tonight.

But back to the canonization Mass. We were like so many lobsters, baking in our juices under a relentless sun. Many of us braided bandanas or handkerchiefs around our heads, which provided amusement to those behind us but kept sunstroke at bay. Thanks to the Vatican police, we had plenty of bottled water as the Mass began. And what did our Pope say about our beloved Mother, beyond canonizing her? He spoke of mercy, of course, the kind of mercy Mother Teresa showed simply by smiling through her extreme darkness. "Thoughtfulness," she said, "is the beginning of great sanctity." To give a nobody a thought, a smile, even though you yourself feel completely empty, is the beginning and perhaps the summation of great sanctity. But where did she get the courage to smile and to serve the other person when she faced such deep inner darkness?

​She had made this decision: I will not go against a king with 20,000 troops if I only have 10,000 (as Jesus counseled in today's gospel). I will be smart: I will only go against the armies of the world, the flesh and the devil by totally surrendering all that I have and am to the Lord of Hosts. I can never, of myself, have enough firepower to overcome my enemies. Only by surrendering everything to my Lord can I expect to overcome my own painful darkness. "So I tell you," Jesus said at Mother Teresa's canonization Mass, "that anyone who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple." She had the courage to do that, and so she won the war. Why were Fr. Pascual and I streaming tears as well as sweat this morning as Pope Francis recognized this heroic virtue? Because we know it to be true, a severely beautiful truth, that is not beyond the grasp of either of us, or any other in that packed St. Peter's Square this morning. "Holiness is the privilege of a few, but the simple duty of you and me," Mother would say. Not only the duty, but the privilege, one day, to join her with God in complete loving trust, which is heaven itself.