It was another day in the Home for the Dying, a year before a 1969 British film that made Mother Teresa the most unlikely of global superstars.<\/p>\n\n
As was her custom, she was taking her turn doing basic chores. Over and over, the tiny nun and a coworker \u2013 an Anglican seminarian named Sathi Bunyan \u2013 lifted patients off the thin pads on narrow steel-framed cots. Fresh sheets weren\u2019t enough. Workers also used this agonizing ritual as a chance to cleanse the sores of those found abandoned along the streets of Calcutta.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cThere was one moment that I will never forget,\u201d recalled Bunyan, who now serves as a priest in Loveland, Colo. \u201cWe were trying to pick up a man whose back was simply covered with sores. This was very hard and, as I lifted his shoulders, my hands slipped and he fell back onto the bed. It was agonizing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
Mother Teresa waited a moment and then prodded her disciple to try again. Her face revealed both compassion and determination. Yes, the man was in pain. Yes, lifting him again, peeling the soiled sheet from his body, and washing his sores, would hurt. But this did not change the fact that this needed to be done, for his sake.<\/p>\n\n
It wasn\u2019t that Mother Teresa had no feelings or had become oblivious to suffering. Just the opposite \u2014 she didn\u2019t let her feelings prevent her from doing what needed to be done. She washed people\u2019s wounds.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cThis is what made Mother who she was,\u201d said Bunyan, who returned to India four years ago to take part in a celebration of her ministry. \u201cShe was not otherworldly. Too often, calling her a saint is just as bad as saying she\u2019s crazy. \u2026 It still puts her off in an unreal world of very spiritual people. Then we don\u2019t have to take her seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
Truth is, Mother Teresa was not a \u201cnice\u201d person in the usual sense of the word. She wasn\u2019t trying to be nice. She was trying to be good. But even her goodness had an edge to it. She was as good as a dentist probing decaying teeth, a parent warning a straying child, a priest urging a sinner to repent. She loved people, but she ultimately cared more about souls than feelings.<\/p>\n\n
She did talk about peace and people liked that. They were less interested in her views on the sources of conflict. Mother Teresa, over and over, insisted that abortion was a sign that violence was seeping into all human relationships. When she accepted the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize she bluntly told her hosts: \u201cAbortion is the worst evil in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
Years later, she faced America\u2019s political establishment at the annual National Prayer Breakfast. Too often, she said, modern parents are too busy to care for their own children or their own marriages. This causes strife, creating poisons that spread into the world and destroy peace. Then abortion teaches people to \u201cuse any violence to get what they want,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n
In one of the defining moments in her life, she turned and looked at President Clinton and Vice President Gore and their wives. \u201cPlease don\u2019t kill the child,\u201d she said. \u201cI want the child. Please give me the child. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted and to give that child a married couple who will love the child and be loved by the child.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
The president responded by praising her \u201cmoving words,\u201d but added: \u201cWe will always have our differences. We will never know the whole truth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
Mother Teresa disagreed. She believed that truth was truth, even if it hurt.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cIn a world of doubts and ambiguities and cynicism, she was blessed with certainties, and the certainties that guided her life and her self-sacrifice are ancient, they are noble,\u201d said Rep. Henry Hyde, during one of many tributes to Mother Teresa on Capitol Hill. \u201cShe believed we are not lost in the stars. \u2026 On the edge of a new century and a new millennium, the world does not lack for icons of evil \u2014 Auschwitz, the gulag, the killing fields of Cambodia, Bosnia, the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. What the world desperately needs are icons of goodness.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was another day in the Home for the Dying, a year before a 1969 British film that made Mother Teresa the most unlikely of global superstars. As was her custom, she was taking her turn doing basic chores. Over and over, the tiny nun and a coworker \u2013 an Anglican seminarian named Sathi Bunyan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n