Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910, in an Albanian family in Northern Macedonia, and grew up in the Roman Catholic faith for the majority of her childhood. Her father died when she was young, and she became very close to her mother, who instilled in her the importance of charity and giving to others. When she turned 18, Teresa decided that she wanted to become a nun, eventually joining the Sisters of Loreto in Dublin, Ireland. She took her first religious vows and adopted the name ‘Teresa’.
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After a year in Dublin, Teresa moved to India to work in a Roman Catholic school for girls in Calcutta in 1931. Most of the girls were extremely poor, and it was Teresa’s goal to aid in alleviating their poverty through education. Teresa taught for a number of years until she heard the call of her inner conscience, which she later described as “the call within the call”, telling her to leave her teaching job and to go work in the slums of Calcutta, to serve the poor and live with them. “I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith”, she said. Priest Joseph Langford later wrote, “Though no one knew it at the time, Sister Teresa had just become Mother Teresa”.
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Mother Teresa began missionary work with the poor in 1948. She received basic medical training for a few months then ventured into the slums. She founded a school in Motijhil, Calcutta, and started tending to the poor and hungry. At the beginning of 1949, Teresa was joined in her effort by a group of young women, and she laid the foundation for a new religious community helping the “poorest among the poor”. She later received Vatican permission to form her congregation, which would become the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic Congregation of women dedicated to helping the poor.
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One day in 1952, as her longtime associate Sister Agnes recalled years later, Mother Teresa found an old woman dying in the streets. “We tried to get someone to take her to a hospital,” Sister Agnes said, “but before we could, she died. Mother said there should be a place where people can die with dignity and know that they are wanted”. And so Mother Teresa set about establishing a home for the dying destitute.
The congregation’s missions kept growing to include caring for the blind, elderly, dying, and people afflicted with leprosy in some of the poorest regions of India. The congregation began to attract recruits and donations, and by the 1960s, it had opened hospices, orphanages, and leper houses throughout India. Teresa then expanded the congregation abroad, opening a house in Venezuela in 1965 with five sisters. Houses and foundations followed in Italy, Tanzania, and Austria in 1968, later expanding into the United States in the 1970s, and dozens of more countries in Asia, Africa and Europe.
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Though it began with a small group of 13 women, multiple religious branches were incorporated into the Missionaries over time: The Missionaries of Charity Brothers was established in 1963, and a contemplative branch of the Sisters followed in 1976. Lay Catholics and non-Catholics were enrolled in the Co-Workers of Mother Teresa, the Sick and Suffering Co-Workers, and the Lay Missionaries of Charity. Responding to requests by many priests, Mother Teresa founded the Corpus Christi Movement for Priests in 1981, and the Missionaries of Charity Fathers in 1984, to combine the vocational aims of the Missionaries of Charity with the resources of the priesthood.
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By 1997, the 13-member Calcutta congregation had grown to more than 4,000 sisters who managed orphanages, AIDS hospices and charity centers worldwide, caring for refugees, the blind, disabled, aged, alcoholics, the poor and homeless, and victims of floods, epidemics and famine. By 2007, the Missionaries of Charity had spread all over the world, with about 450 brothers and 5,000 sisters worldwide operating 600 missions, schools, and shelters in 120 countries.
Mother Teresa spent more than 45 years helping the poor and underprivileged. Her humanitarian work has been recognized and acclaimed throughout the world and she has received a number of awards and distinctions. She died in September 1997 and was beatified in October 2003.
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In 1979, Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her humanitarian work in bringing help to suffering humanity, in particular the attention and care she brought to the plight of children and refugees. According to the Nobel Committee, “constructive efforts to do away with hunger and poverty, and to ensure for mankind a safer and better world community in which to develop, should be inspired by the spirit of Mother Teresa, by her respect for the worth and dignity of the individual human being.”
She refused the conventional ceremonial banquet for laureates, asking that its $192,000 cost be given to the poor in India and saying that earthly rewards were important only if they helped her to help the world's needy. When Teresa received the prize she was asked, “What can we do to promote world peace?” She answered, “Go home and love your family.”
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During her acceptance speech, she said: “It is so beautiful for us to become holy to this love, for holiness is not a luxury of the few, it is a simple duty for each one of us, and through this love we can become holy. To this love for one another and today when I have received this reward, I personally am most unworthy, and I having avowed poverty to be able to understand the poor, I choose the poverty of our people. But I am grateful and I am very happy to receive it in the name of the hungry, of the naked, of the homeless, of the crippled, of the blind, of the leprous, of all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared, thrown away of the society, people who have become a burden to the society, and are ashamed by everybody.”
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Here, you will find simple and gentle practices, prompts and rituals that will help you connect with the energy of Mother Teresa and embody her qualities.
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Each day of the week, engage in a secret act of virtue or kindness. Do something nice or needed for others, but do so anonymously. these acts can be very simple, like washing someone else’s dishes, picking up trash on the sidewalk, making an anonymous donation, or leaving a small gift on a coworker’s desk.
This practice helps us look at how willing we are to put the effort out to do good things for others if we never earn credit for it. Zen practice emphasizes “going straight on”—leading our lives in a straightforward way based on what we know to be good practice, undaunted by praise or criticism. A monk once asked the Chinese Zen master Hui-hai “What is the gate [meaning both entrance and pillar] of Zen practice?” Hui-hai answered: “Complete giving”.
The Buddha spoke constantly of the value of generosity, saying it is the most effective way to reach enlightenment. He recommended giving simple gifts—water, food, shelter, clothing, transportation, flowers. Even poor people can be generous he said, by giving a crumb of their food to an ant. Each time we give something away, whether it is a material object or our time, we are letting go of a bit of ourselves and practicing the utmost generosity. Generosity if the highest virtue, and anonymous giving is the highest form of generosity.
Practice by Jan Chozen Bays, from Mindfulness on the Go
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Every day before you go to bed, write down five things that you can be grateful for that day. In Simple Abundance, Sarah Ban Breathnach describes this journal exercise as a transformative process: "As the months pass and you fill your journal with blessings, an inner shift in your reality will occur."
There's a growing body of research on the benefits of gratitude. Studies have found that giving thanks and counting blessings can help people sleep better, lower stress and improve interpersonal relationships. A study found that keeping a gratitude journal decreased materialism and bolstered generosity among adolescents.
In another study, high school students who were asked to keep gratitude journals reported healthier eating. There's also some evidence it could lower your risk of heart disease and lower symptoms of depression for some people.
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Listen to this 15-minute guided loving kindness meditation. Compassion meditation involves silently repeating certain phrases that express the intention to move from judgment to caring, from isolation to connection, from indifference to understanding. The practice involves bringing to mind different people (including yourself), and sending them loving-kindness and peace. You don't have to force a particular feeling or get rid of unpleasant or undesirable reactions; the power of the practice is in the wholehearted gathering of attention and energy, and concentrating on each phrase.
Notice how this practice makes you feel. What happened to your heart? Did you feel warmth, openness and tenderness? Did you have a wish to take away the other’s suffering? How does your heart feel different when you envision your own or a loved one’s suffering, a stranger’s, or a difficult person’s? Bask in the joy of this open-hearted wish to ease the suffering of all people and beings, and how this attempt brings joy, happiness, and compassion in your heart at this very moment.
Practice by Penny McGahey on Insight Timer
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It was said that the words below were written on the wall in Mother Teresa’s home.
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People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered.
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may think you have ulterior motives.
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies.
Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you.
Be honest and sincere anyway.
What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight.
Create anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous.
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, will often be forgotten.
Do good anyway.
Give the best you have, and it will never be enough.
Give your best anyway.
In the final analysis, it is between you and God.
It was never between you and them anyway.
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Learn more about Mother Teresa, her essential wisdom and inspiring teachings, with the following resources.
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✎ Book
‘Mother Teresa: An Authorized Biography’
by Kathryn Spink -
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‘Mother Teresa: In My Own Words’
by Mother Teresa & José Luis González-Balado -
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‘Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta’
by Mother Teresa & Brian Kolodiejchuk -
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‘Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Witness to Love’
by Michael J. Ruszala & Wyatt North -
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‘No Greater Love’
by Mother Teresa -
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‘A Revolution of Love: The Meaning of Mother Teresa’
by David Scott -
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‘Mother Teresa: A Life Inspired’
by Wyatt North -
✎ Book
‘A Simple Path’ by Mother Teresa