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Once in Darjeeling she saw a man carrying what she took to be a bundle of rags with two dry sticks poking out. It turned out to be a dying boy that he proposed to leave in the grass. She took the boy and tended him till he died, saying that this gave her a greater joy than she had ever known.
She took her final monastic vows in 1937, which is when she was named Mother Teresa. But it was still many years before she was able to fulfill her calling to devote herself to the poor. Her superiors continued to employ her as a teacher in Calcutta, and from 1944 as the principal of the school.
The returning point came on Tuesday 10 September 1946, "the most important day of my life".
Travelling by train from Calcutta to Darjeeling, she read in her Bible Jesus' story of the sheep and the goats. In this story, at judgement day, Jesus divides his true followers from the false (like sheep and goats) on the basis of whether or not they fed him when he was hungry, gave him water when he was thirsty, clothed him when he was naked and visited him in prison. Both groups say that they never saw Jesus in such a state, but Jesus explains: "Whenever you did this for one of the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it for me."
"I felt the holy words peircing into the innermost recesses of my heart," Teresa said. She felt irresistably summoned to give up even the meagre comforts of the nunnery and live amongst the poorest in Calcutta just as they lived, tending to their needs as if each one of them were Jesus himself.
She told herself: "You must see your beloved Jesus in each one of these miserable people. You must love that Jesus, serve that Jesus and look after that Jesus."
Next: Life among the dying |
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