Mother Teresa's Words of Advice From 1972 Visit to Utah
Michael Patrick O’Brien
A half century ago, in October 1972, Mother Teresa of Calcutta (now known as Saint Teresa of Kolkata) visited the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity, the now-closed Trappist monastery in Huntsville. She was there to see her friend Brother Nicholas Prinster, who had worked with her in India, but she also met with the monks and some of her American supporters.
A few years ago in the pages of this newspaper, I shared the story of my own brief encounter with her at the monastery. Now, thanks to some detective work and research, I can share what she said during this brief but historic visit to Utah.
Eileen Egan, a New York Catholic writer and activist, accompanied Mother Teresa on the trip and tape recorded some of the meetings at the Huntsville monastery. The tapes are available for public review, along with various other historical materials about Mother Teresa that Egan produced or collected and eventually donated to the archives of the Catholic University of America. Years after the 1972 visit, I listened to the tapes (which the university archivists kindly digitized for me) to learn the interesting details about the saint’s talks in Utah.
As might be expected, Mother Teresa’s Huntsville meetings and discussions covered many normal and somewhat mundane topics related to the details of running a charitable organization in the United States. These topics included legal issues, where to possibly locate missionary houses in America, whether to charge recipients for materials or viewing films or receiving newsletters (Mother Teresa gently but adamantly opposed charging anyone for anything), coordinating work with dioceses and existing groups (on this point, Mother Teresa said, “I would not like for anybody or any of those organizations to think that we are making something new. … We don’t want to break or destroy anything, but we must complete.”)
She also spoke about how and where to conduct coworker meetings, publicizing the work, the challenges in safely sending money to India, how to send receipts for various financial contributions (Mother Teresa instructed they must always “Respect the mind of the donor”), and how/where people could volunteer to help.
In addition to such routine and ordinary organizational details, the Huntsville tapes also provide some of Mother Teresa’s own words on the essential nature of her service to the poorest of the poor or, as she called it, “the work.” She emphasized a half dozen major themes and principles during her Utah talks.
First, she said the work of caring for the poor must be centered in Jesus Christ. Second, people should look first to help the poor in their own neighborhoods before seeking to help the poor in far-flung places. Third, the work can and should begin in a small way, by doing even just the “one thing” that may lead to more meaningful things.
Fourth, volunteers should thank those who help them. Fifth, every person of any means – rich or poor – can share in the work. And finally, although she and others chose to be poor to understand the poor, those doing the work must do it with joy and a smile, notwithstanding the poverty.
Catholic saints do not publicly speak in Utah very often, so her message not only is important, it is historic. More details on each of her chosen themes follow below.
First and foremost, Mother Teresa repeatedly emphasized – to both the monks and to her coworkers – the central importance of Jesus in the work. She said, “And for us, the whole work is built on the words of Christ: ‘I was hungry and I was homeless and I was sick and I was ignorant … and you gave to me.’”
She was modest about her own role, exhorting her listeners (to laughter) not to do the work in the name of Mother Teresa because “the sooner that name goes out of the picture, the better.” She stated several times that the work was not that of a social worker, but rather it was a religious mission to “witness Christ” and to bring Jesus to, and find him in, the poor she served.
“We can give to the people only Jesus, because people are hungry for him, not for us,” she said.
She suggested that her coworkers emphasize the centrality of Jesus by regularly sharing in the Catholic sacraments, notably Communion, together as a community.
“If you really want to love the poor, if you really believe it is Jesus in the poor, then we must have that first contact with him, then we will be able to see him there,” she said. “Once we lose that oneness with Christ, we will also lose the love for Christ and the poor.”
She equated the Body of Christ received at Communion with the poor bodies for whom she cared, describing how one sister, after long and laborious efforts to clean the maggots off a sick and dying man, came home and told her, “I have been touching the body of Christ for three hours!”
This emphasis prompted Mother Teresa and her sisters to try to show the face of God to the poor for whom they cared, to bless them, and to help them seek forgiveness for their sins. As she told the Utah Trappists, because “naturally, everyone wants his sins to be forgiven and to see God,” most of her dying patients – even non-Catholics – gladly accepted the Christian blessings offered.
After the patients died, however, Mother Teresa respected the religion of the patient. “When they die, we didn’t change anything in our books. We leave in the books if he’s a Hindu, and then we send for the Hindu people and they come and take the body and they cremate it according to their rites. And then the Muslims come and the Buddhists come. … We don’t interfere with them. I think this has been a wonderful way of helping many people.”
After describing how she anchors her work in Christ, Mother Teresa addressed five other themes. She explained how people should look first to help the poor in their own neighborhoods before seeking to help the poor in far-flung places. She then discussed how what she called “the work” can and should begin in a small way, by doing even just the “one thing” that may lead to more meaningful things. She said volunteers should thank those who help them. She emphasized that every person of any means can share in the work. And finally, although she and others chose to be poor to understand the poor, those doing the work must do it with joy and a smile.
Time and again in her Huntsville presentations, Mother Teresa gently reminded her listeners that “poor people are everywhere,” and it was not necessary to go and see her in Calcutta, or volunteer in faraway locations such as India, in order to help the poor. She placed great value in focusing on local needs. For example, during discussions about sending supplies to India from America, and regarding an American nun from another order who wanted to help in India, Mother Teresa repeatedly asked her coworkers to “concentrate on the close-by places.” It was her way of saying, “think globally but act locally.”
Similarly, she recounted how certain men, members from the Christian Brothers order who were teaching in a wealthy school in Australia, wrote to her wanting to leave their rather posh (by comparison to Calcutta) surroundings and help her in India. She wrote back and urged the brothers to stay where they were, but to bring more local poor people into their wealthier community. She told them something true for poor and rich alike in their local community: “If you are not there, who will give God to them?”
In her Utah talks, Mother Teresa often repeated her belief that charitable efforts begin “in a very small way” by “doing the one thing.” She used herself as an illustration, with 1972 data. “If I didn’t pick up that one person, I would not have picked up 37,000. In Calcutta alone, we have picked up 37,000 people from the streets. If I had missed that one, quite possibly I would not have picked up 37,000.” The same was true in her care for lepers. She started by helping three, and as of 1972, told how she had cared for about 47,000, all because she started with just three of them.
Starting small also led to big changes for Mother Teresa in another way, specifically a change in the attitude of local people towards her. She told the Huntsville monks how her Calcutta house for the dying (called “Kalighat”) was in a former temple to Kali, the Hindu goddess of time, creation and destruction. Kali’s image is a fearful one, with blue skin and bearing swords and other weapons in her many arms. At first, many Hindus objected to Mother Teresa’s presence in the old, abandoned temple. They would protest outside and shout, “Kill Mother Teresa!”
One day they made too much noise and disturbed her patients, and so she confronted them, “You want to kill me? Kill me! I’ll go to Heaven, but you must stop this nonsense!” They did stop the nonsense. Later, the Hindus who had shouted for her eviction or worse brought her a young Hindu priest with tuberculosis because no other hospital or person would take him in. Mother Teresa personally accepted him and cared for him in the former Hindu temple until he died peacefully.
In Utah, Mother Teresa explained the importance of expressing gratitude to those persons who had helped and supported the work, “even if they give you one cent.” Displaying the keen sense of humor evident in many parts of her taped discussions, she told the story of how one man would send her one rupee each month.
“It cost him more to send it by post, I think,” she said. “Then, every month I had to send a card to him that said, ‘God bless.’” She explained how one month, either while travelling or otherwise busy, she had not yet responded to her small but determined donor, “and he wrote back to me and said, ‘You never sent me a ‘God bless you’ note!’”
By such examples, Mother Teresa taught that “Everybody can share in the work.” Again, she illustrated her point with stories. One involved the “University Boys” from Brahmin families who would come and do menial work at her home for the dying. This included touching and cleaning the “untouchables,” those persons on the lowest rung of the Indian caste system. All this work was risky – the upper-class volunteers might be cast out of their wealthy homes for doing it.
Another story involved a poor man who recognized Mother Teresa at a railroad station and offered to pay for her train ticket. She said he wanted to participate in the work, but because of his extreme poverty, it was not practical.
“It hurt me to accept the money [for the train fare],” she said, “but I would have hurt him very badly if I had refused him, so I said yes. … I knew that was all that this man had, but he said, ‘Thank you for allowing me to share in the work.’”
Finally, Mother Teresa explained to her 1972 Huntsville audience that those sisters who chose to work with her had to choose to be poor, but they also had to agree to work joyfully despite the poverty.
“To be able to understand the poor and to know who the poor are and to understand their poverty, we try to live like the poor,” she said. “And though our poverty is of choice, we choose to be without things and the poor people are forced to be poor.”
This issue was one of basic credibility for her. “We can look straight into the face of our poor people and say ‘I understand, I know, I know exactly how you feel.’ This has helped us come very close to them,” she said.
However, she required that her workers “radiate joy” to the people, because she and her sisters “have no reason to be unhappy,” she said. “We have every reason to be happy.”
She underscored the point by repeating a joke that supposedly was circulating in Rome and the Vatican at the time: “When the Holy Father retires, he is going to become the chaplain for Mother Teresa in the slums.”
It’s quite remarkable that Mother Teresa visited Utah, and I think it is even more remarkable that we have a record of what she said when she was here. She sketched out a rather simple and clear way for us to care for others, one that remains as relevant today as it did a half century ago when she outlined it.
Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City. His book “Monastery Mornings,” about growing up with the Trappist monks at the now-closed Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity monastery in Huntsville, was published by Paraclete Press in August 2021. He can be reached at https://michaelpobrien.com/
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