In the footsteps of Mother Teresa
Parishioner Audrey Cabrera Amort of St. Matthew Parish in San Mateo gave herself an unusual present for her 27th birthday: a trip to the Missionaries of Charity motherhouse in Calcutta to walk in the footsteps of her hero Mother Teresa.
Amort said she wanted to travel alone as a young woman just as Mother Teresa did when she founded the order. She said she would have taken three months instead of three weeks if she could have gotten the time off from her job.
Amort, a former intern for Catholic San Francisco, was a bit uneasy arriving by herself with just her duffel bag and a box of donations from the Missionaries of Charity community in Pacifica. But a friendly adventure unfolded as soon as she boarded the taxi from the airport. The driver knew only one word of English - "motherhouse" - and had a statue of Mother Teresa on his dashboard.
"So I get to the motherhouse and I have the biggest smile on my face, because it's my dream to go to motherhouse," she said.
Cabrera had her choice of volunteer assignments at any of the order's many convents. She asked to work with children.
She was assigned to work with a boy who was about six years old and blind. His name was Johnny. She knew nothing of his past and could not imagine what kind of future he might have. Her task was simply to give the boy all the love she could.
That meant holding him, singing to him, talking to him, carrying him around, trying to make him laugh.
"There are a lot of children and not enough hands," she said. "The children are severely handicapped. It's a lot of work, and it's overwhelming. I've never experienced that, ever, when I volunteer in the U.S. It's homeless people and they can walk and talk and see and reach for their own food. But in Calcutta they can't do that. The children can't reach for anything, so you have to feed them, you have to change their diaper, you have to play with them, tickle them, make them laugh, give them a pleasant experience."
Cabrera said: "I've never given so much of myself on a volunteer job."
After mornings with the children, Cabrera volunteered at the motherhouse. "I just wanted to be there where Mother Teresa walked and slept," she said.
She was assigned to help organize Mother Teresa's relics and to read letters from people who believed they had been healed because of her intercession. Mother Teresa was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2003, six years after her death. Her order is hoping that the faithful will venerate her as a blessed person and increase prayers imploring her canonization.
The sisters also asked Amort to review press clippings, both friendly and negative, of Mother Teresa and her work.
"I read them and found some people didn't love her, some people even despised her work," Cabrera said. "It's amazing how some people can be so ungrateful for the Mother Teresas of our world."
Some of the articles critical of Mother Teresa argued that she made the suffering of the poor worse by keeping them alive.
"It was just ridiculous nonsense," Cabrera said. "They don't understand that everyone has an equal opportunity to live and be loved."
For example, after the posthumous publication of Mother Teresa's letters revealing that she had suffered a loss of feeling in her faith, the atheist writer Christopher Hitchens labeled her a "fanatical and insecure," "troubled and miserable" woman who recruited people to a faith she no longer believed in.
Loss of feeling is not the same as loss of faith, Missionary of Charity Father Joseph Langford told Zenit in 2007. He said Mother Teresa's struggles strengthened her faith. "Though she would not understand it until later, she was being asked to share the same inner darkness, the same trial of belief suffered by the poor and destitute - and to do so for their sake, and for the love of her Lord," he said.
By Rick DelVecchio
From July 24, 2009 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
