MOTHER TERESA
ISABELITA T. SALINAS
A reporter once asked Mother Teresa how she could do all the work she did. She answered: ” Not I, but Jesus in me Who’s doing it.” Mother Teresa’s motto of ” serving the poorest of the poor ” was a mandate from God.
As a volunteer in her home for the poor in Tondo, Manila, I came into the presence of this holy woman. I experienced the love and dedication of Mother Teresa and her nuns in their ongoing work ” to give each person the dignity of dying as a human being.” I saw her nuns coming from Smokey Mountain, having retrieved not garbage, but dying persons among the garbage.
Mother Teresa picked up human beings no one wanted…scraps of humanity nobody cared about. And she found many! I loved her encompassing love for anyone, regardless of age, gender, religion. Mother Teresa recognized no nights, days, nor holidays. Her work with the poor was continuous, whether they were sick, dying, or needing to be fed at the gate of the Tondo House.
One day, I was at the Tondo House and was asked to help a dying man. This man had only half a face. His cancer had devoured the other side of it. He was known to be violent. So his limbs were tied to a slab of wood on the floor that served as his bed, as he squirmed and shouted angrily. I approached him.
I knelt on the floor and started to wipe the sweat off his forehead with my handkerchief, whispering an invitation for us to pray together. I began to pray the “Ama Namin” (Our Father) slowly while continuing to wipe his forehead. He began to relax. I asked someone to untie him. The shouting and the squirming had ceased. As I got to the part ” Patawarin mo po kami sa aming mga sala” (Forgive us our trespasses), I saw voluminous tears streaming down his cheeks from his one remaining eye. I cried, too, as I continued to pray.
After we finished praying, I wiped his tears. And then I wiped mine. I realized only later that I had used my handkerchief to wipe his sweat, then his tears and mine, in a spontaneous and personal moment of human connectedness.
The priest who had come with me that day watched all that had unfolded, and gave the last blessings to the dying man. Later, in a quiet voice touched with awe, he said: “God was surely in that place.”
In my unusual quietude and feeling somewhat stunned myself, I was likewise sure God was there. How else could it have happened? As a volunteer, he had allowed me to experience for a few unforgettable, sacred minutes what Mother Teresa and her nuns are allowed to do daily, continuously. As devoted instruments of God’s mercy, they can help every dying person in their hands to go home to God with peace and dignity.
Once, I watched a nun holding a small child so skinny that the legs were literally like sticks covered with skin. The child, whose head was the size of a small basketball, began to vomit and excrete feces from diarrhea. Both discharges spilled over the nun’s habit. I felt like throwing up but tried to keep my composure by asking her how many months old the child was. She said: ” Four years old.” I couldn’t help but ask her how she could so calmly take this child’s vomit and excretion all over her habit, and she answered: ” I cried for ten years before today.”
I went to the Center for the last time to bring breakfast for a special occasion, along with other volunteers. Three ladies were being installed as novices. After the event, I waited for the crowd to disperse and took the opportunity to approach Mother Teresa. With her permission, I embraced her lightly and kissed her three times. She was a very diminutive, frail woman, so bent, so thin, so small. So I apologized and said: “I am sorry that I hugged you too tight. I am hoping that I could be like you.” She tried to straighten up and look at me. ” You cannot follow me…are you married? You have to follow your own path.”
Mother Theresa of Calcutta was beatified by Pope John Paul ll at the Vatican, on October 19, 2003.
A good friend of mine had secured for me a ticket for the beatification ceremony, which of course, meant flying out to Rome to attend it. My husband was not too agreeable about my going. I sat there disappointed but remembered Mother Teresa’s words, allowing her abiding gift to settle within me.
” You cannot follow me…you have to follow your path.”
I felt light and happy. I called my friend. Precious as that ticket was, I asked her then to give it to someone else.
See Mother Teresa’s Morning Trick, Pananagutan – Link
https://www.whitebutterfly.ph/2020/11/12/mother-teresas-morning-trick/