ST. ORDINARY: MOTHER TERESA'S HUMBLE LESSON

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

Last Sunday, in Roman Catholic churches around the world, the Gospel told the familiar tale of a rich man's quest for Paradise.

"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God," Jesus said.

This is a bold statement. But what does it mean? That the rich are doomed? That in the afterlife the poor finally get what they never had on Earth?

Wealth is a distraction. That's the simple point of the story. The rich lose their way because money makes them believe they are better off - and better THAN- the poor.

Mother Teresa knew this wasn't so. In Rome, today, she will become Blessed Mother Teresa, a saint on the fast track - not because, like many others before her, she died for Christ. But because she lived for him. For 50 years she worked with the sick and the destitute in Calcutta, one of the world's poorest cities. And she didn't do this out of guilt or need or charity. She did it for the love of God because she saw God in every person.

And they saw God in her.

St. Augustine wrote, "So we are many, but one body in Christ; we are each of us members of one another, having different gifts according to the grace that has been given us."

Mother Teresa didn't judge or categorize people. She didn't do God's work for man's praise. She did it for God. And she did it in the name of God.

About 10 years ago she visited MCI-Concord and Bernard Cardinal Law and his entourage accompanied her. He arrived at the prison the way members of the hierarchy generally do, in red and robes, the bedecked and bejeweled spiritual leader of the Archdiocese of Boston. She arrived in her habit - a simple blue-bordered cotton sari, accompanied by two sisters from her order, who were dressed as she was. She was old even then, small and lined and bent. But she was a presence. She spoke to a room full of reporters, and the room was silent in a way these rooms are generally not.

You have a gift, she told us, and a responsibility. You influence how people think. You must use your gift wisely and always pray before you write.

There wasn't one confrontational question: No "Why are you here?" or "Do you think these prisoners are worthy of your time?" Because everyone knew the answer.

When I was a kid, I had a tiny book fittingly called "Miniature Stories of the Saints." All the women saints - I liked their stories best - were described as beautiful and pious. And when arrested by soldiers who tortured and killed them simply because they were Christians, they were unwaveringly brave.

Saints, back then, were as divine as angels.

Pope John Paul II has changed this. He's canonized more men and women than have any of his predecessors during the past 500 years combined. A total, so far, of 476 new saints. Saints walk among us, is what he's saying. Saints aren't just pretty pictures of people with halos and folded hands who lived hundreds of years ago. Saints are here right now using their hands and their hearts to do the work of God.

As for miracles? The church requires two posthumous miracles - one for beatification, another for sainthood. A woman with an inoperable tumor in her stomach testified she prayed to Mother Teresa. "I had a picture of Mother Teresa close to me and I would pray to her all the time and tell her that I went everywhere and no one could help me. Now I am in your care. Help me and cure me," Monika Besra told CNN in September.

And she was cured.

Miracle? Or coincidence? It makes a difference only to the Vatican. Mother Teresa is already a saint, the ceremony today to beatify her and the ceremony later to canonize her nice, but part of a world she wasn't part of.

She died in 1997 at the age of 87. For 50 years she worked miracles every day. She clothed the naked. She fed the hungry. She visited the sick. She buried the dead. She saw God in every person she met, beggar or king, and made no distinction between the two.

"Let me praise you in the way you love best, by shining on those around me," she prayed every morning. "Let me preach you without preaching, not by words, but by my example."

No matter what she's called, Mother Teresa or St. Teresa, she was a shining example of God's perfect love.