Photo credit: www. edexlive.com Today is the day Mother Teresa died in Calcutta twenty-eight years ago, and so today is the day the Church celebrates her dies natalis, the day she was born into eternity. The same Church canonized her on September 4, 2016, declaring with certitude that God took her from Calcutta straight to heaven. If one fully engages grace in that city, Calcutta is certainly a purgatory on earth. But as Mother pointed out frequently, one can find the immense love she found in Calcutta in every city and village. “Go home and find Calcutta where you live,” she would encourage those who wanted to prolong their stay at Motherhouse on Lower Circular Road (now A.J.C. Bose Road). In three weeks at Motherhouse in April 1997, I found a great love of God in that city. Mother Teresa was in a wheelchair by then, parked against the back wall of the chapel, along with a hundred sisters and a hundred lay volunteers as the deafening roar of A.J.C. Bose Road came through the open windows. I found Jesus himself—I held Him in my arms—when I carried a naked man back from his bath at the Home for Dying Destitutes. I knew he was Jesus, and I knew that I had never done anything remotely Christian before He allowed me to carry His frail body back from the washroom that morning.
God gave me another grace in the sacristy after Mass one morning. Having been raised in Sacred Heart Parish in Skopje, Mother Teresa installed a kitschy print of the Sacred Heart above the vesting table to remind her priests of Christ’s divine and human heart. Mother Teresa usually wheeled herself into the sacristy after Mass to thank the priest and ask about his day. She sat there that morning, looking at me, and the kitschy print of the Sacred Heart above her head looked at me too. The picture of Jesus that I had seen thousands of times without giving it a second thought came alive for me that morning, and I knew that I had a Savior. Being close to a saint—especially an extraordinary saint—opens one’s mind and heart to the invisible realities in which that saint holds daily converse. To be close to a living saint is wonderful, but to be close to a “dead” saint is good too, which explains the Church’s veneration of relics. A relic of Mother Teresa (my breviary which she signed with “God Bless You, M [aria]. Teresa, MC”) was kissed by a dying friend, and a week later Stanford Medical Center could find no trace of the intestinal cancer that had spread throughout her body.
I am not in the deafening city of Calcutta today but in the quiet fields of West Cork, where I have only two weeks left of my three-month sabbatical. The Archbishop kindly afforded me ninety days away from my bustling parish to write two books, both of which I have finished (at least the first drafts). One is the history of Star of the Sea parish, at one point the westernmost Catholic Church on the American Continent, and so the book is entitled Star of the West. The other book is a high-level look at 18 Marian apparitions entitled Mother of the Light. I had to distance myself from the parish to gain the perspective needed to write a full and balanced history of that parish, from 1776 to 2026 (in time for the Church’s 250th anniversary in San Francisco next year). I had to distance myself from my Marian shrine in San Francisco to write a thoughtful summary of all the apparitions of Our Lady throughout history. To more fully understand the world, one must get away from and above the world at times. History, literature (especially poetry), philosophy and theology, art and music—all of these “big picture” disciplines that education so painfully lacks these days—are vital to a meaningful life.
Unfortunately, the big picture and creation’s multiple dimensions have been reduced to a tiny flat screen much of the time. Last week I went to England, both to confer with an author and to visit a former parishioner at the Birmingham Oratory. The author had written a book like mine, and the parishioner wanted me to see Cardinal Newman's vast library before he is named the thirty-eighth doctor of the Church. To get through London and Birmingham, I felt it necessary to bring my little screen. It’s GPS directed me through complicated city streets and twisting English byways, for which I am grateful. At the same time, my eyes were torn between beholding the green countryside of “Mary’s Dowry” (the fields and copses around Walsingham are particularly lovely) and fixating on the tiny screen. My cellphone reduced the glories of England to a flat and colorless series of lines and numbers (the M25, the A1065, and the B1355, for example). It was a necessary evil, I suppose, to get from London to Nottingham, but how dismal merry England appeared on my little screen. Here in Ireland my eyes were glued to my little screen for the first three weeks as I found my way around Cork City and the farmlands further west. What a sense of relief when I knew the roads well enough to put my phone aside and look out the window for myself!
I brought my pretty red bike to Ireland, and I ride it every day past well-kept farms and seaside villages. Because the roads here are narrow, twisting, and enclosed by tall hedgerows, I installed a little mirror at the bottom of my right handlebar. But I found myself glancing down a bit too often at that little picture. It’s tempting to fixate on the screens “for safety” and for a sense of control. They are helpful, to be sure, but how much better to look around us, to see and think freely, to behold the vast horizons God spreads before us.
Mother Teresa left her Albanian village in 1928 for Dublin, to become a Loretto Sister. “Put your hand in Our Lady’s hand,” her mother told her as she got on the train. “Don’t look back, because if you look back you will go back.” Young Agnes (who would take the name “Teresa”) did not look back. She looked forward, even to the vast horizons of the Indian subcontinent, to which she had been assigned. She found a brilliance in Calcutta's darkness, and from that city she taught the entire world to look up, not down. Look down at your little screen only as much as is absolutely necessary, but look up into the sky, to the sun and the clouds and the stars, as much as you can.
God gave me another grace in the sacristy after Mass one morning. Having been raised in Sacred Heart Parish in Skopje, Mother Teresa installed a kitschy print of the Sacred Heart above the vesting table to remind her priests of Christ’s divine and human heart. Mother Teresa usually wheeled herself into the sacristy after Mass to thank the priest and ask about his day. She sat there that morning, looking at me, and the kitschy print of the Sacred Heart above her head looked at me too. The picture of Jesus that I had seen thousands of times without giving it a second thought came alive for me that morning, and I knew that I had a Savior. Being close to a saint—especially an extraordinary saint—opens one’s mind and heart to the invisible realities in which that saint holds daily converse. To be close to a living saint is wonderful, but to be close to a “dead” saint is good too, which explains the Church’s veneration of relics. A relic of Mother Teresa (my breviary which she signed with “God Bless You, M [aria]. Teresa, MC”) was kissed by a dying friend, and a week later Stanford Medical Center could find no trace of the intestinal cancer that had spread throughout her body.
I am not in the deafening city of Calcutta today but in the quiet fields of West Cork, where I have only two weeks left of my three-month sabbatical. The Archbishop kindly afforded me ninety days away from my bustling parish to write two books, both of which I have finished (at least the first drafts). One is the history of Star of the Sea parish, at one point the westernmost Catholic Church on the American Continent, and so the book is entitled Star of the West. The other book is a high-level look at 18 Marian apparitions entitled Mother of the Light. I had to distance myself from the parish to gain the perspective needed to write a full and balanced history of that parish, from 1776 to 2026 (in time for the Church’s 250th anniversary in San Francisco next year). I had to distance myself from my Marian shrine in San Francisco to write a thoughtful summary of all the apparitions of Our Lady throughout history. To more fully understand the world, one must get away from and above the world at times. History, literature (especially poetry), philosophy and theology, art and music—all of these “big picture” disciplines that education so painfully lacks these days—are vital to a meaningful life.
Unfortunately, the big picture and creation’s multiple dimensions have been reduced to a tiny flat screen much of the time. Last week I went to England, both to confer with an author and to visit a former parishioner at the Birmingham Oratory. The author had written a book like mine, and the parishioner wanted me to see Cardinal Newman's vast library before he is named the thirty-eighth doctor of the Church. To get through London and Birmingham, I felt it necessary to bring my little screen. It’s GPS directed me through complicated city streets and twisting English byways, for which I am grateful. At the same time, my eyes were torn between beholding the green countryside of “Mary’s Dowry” (the fields and copses around Walsingham are particularly lovely) and fixating on the tiny screen. My cellphone reduced the glories of England to a flat and colorless series of lines and numbers (the M25, the A1065, and the B1355, for example). It was a necessary evil, I suppose, to get from London to Nottingham, but how dismal merry England appeared on my little screen. Here in Ireland my eyes were glued to my little screen for the first three weeks as I found my way around Cork City and the farmlands further west. What a sense of relief when I knew the roads well enough to put my phone aside and look out the window for myself!
I brought my pretty red bike to Ireland, and I ride it every day past well-kept farms and seaside villages. Because the roads here are narrow, twisting, and enclosed by tall hedgerows, I installed a little mirror at the bottom of my right handlebar. But I found myself glancing down a bit too often at that little picture. It’s tempting to fixate on the screens “for safety” and for a sense of control. They are helpful, to be sure, but how much better to look around us, to see and think freely, to behold the vast horizons God spreads before us.
Mother Teresa left her Albanian village in 1928 for Dublin, to become a Loretto Sister. “Put your hand in Our Lady’s hand,” her mother told her as she got on the train. “Don’t look back, because if you look back you will go back.” Young Agnes (who would take the name “Teresa”) did not look back. She looked forward, even to the vast horizons of the Indian subcontinent, to which she had been assigned. She found a brilliance in Calcutta's darkness, and from that city she taught the entire world to look up, not down. Look down at your little screen only as much as is absolutely necessary, but look up into the sky, to the sun and the clouds and the stars, as much as you can.
Surveying St. John Henry Newman's vast library at the Birmingham Oratory with Brother Edmund last week
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