The sisters pray the divine office beside Mother Teresa's tomb in Calcutta with a few of us priests. Mother Teresa was doing God's work among the poorest of the poor but still had to find a place to live. "While looking for a home I walked and walked until my arms and legs ached. I thought how much the poor must ache in body and soul, looking for a home, for food and health." She walked out of her comfortable convent school and never stopped walking. She eventually walked all over the planet, founding 520 "field hospitals" in over 100 countries.
I offered Mass this morning in one of them, a former paint factory that the sisters have converted into a loving home for 300 street people, some of whom are so deformed by disease or injury as to appear subhuman. The government cannot or will not take them in. One woman had no face (it had been burned off by acid thrown at her by a disturbed husband). One man's twisted frame was afflicted with tumors so large and distended as to appear covered with oddly-shaped brown water balloons.
Mother and her sisters have been walking the dusty paths of this world to find and to give love. They find it and they give it in the oddest places. But in every place they go, they first set up a tabernacle. It was before Calcutta's tabernacle in Motherhouse that I knelt tonight, with fifty sisters and a few priests. Sr. Prema (Mother Teresa's successor) knelt in the back, and not far from her Sr. Patrick, the Irish sister who has been a true mother to North America. We sang of God's love, and our love for each other, before the Blessed Sacrament, and it seemed to me I had come home. Mother taught us that the center of the great world map is the nearest tabernacle, where Jesus waits for us. He has made a home for us in this world, to prepare us for an eternal home in the next.
I offered Mass this morning in one of them, a former paint factory that the sisters have converted into a loving home for 300 street people, some of whom are so deformed by disease or injury as to appear subhuman. The government cannot or will not take them in. One woman had no face (it had been burned off by acid thrown at her by a disturbed husband). One man's twisted frame was afflicted with tumors so large and distended as to appear covered with oddly-shaped brown water balloons.
Mother and her sisters have been walking the dusty paths of this world to find and to give love. They find it and they give it in the oddest places. But in every place they go, they first set up a tabernacle. It was before Calcutta's tabernacle in Motherhouse that I knelt tonight, with fifty sisters and a few priests. Sr. Prema (Mother Teresa's successor) knelt in the back, and not far from her Sr. Patrick, the Irish sister who has been a true mother to North America. We sang of God's love, and our love for each other, before the Blessed Sacrament, and it seemed to me I had come home. Mother taught us that the center of the great world map is the nearest tabernacle, where Jesus waits for us. He has made a home for us in this world, to prepare us for an eternal home in the next.
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