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To Love and Be Loved: A Personal Portrait of Mother Teresa (Book Thoughts)

To Love and Be Loved: A Personal Portrait of Mother TeresaTo Love and Be Loved: A Personal Portrait of Mother Teresa by Jim Towey

This book was given to me by a Benedictine priest who is known to Jim Towey, who in turn, as this book lays out, was known to Mother Teresa. There you have it: I am three degrees of separation away from Mother Teresa. Wow.

I never thought my life would take this turn where I would encounter such people who would change the shape of my life.

And now, having finished this book, an encounter with a man who shared a lifelong friendship with this modern saint, I am challenged to shift my focus. To change the very foundation of my being. To reprioritise. To lay down my life for my friends, out of love, just like this lady did.

It is encouraging to learn that she too struggled with the darkness. She knew the deep loneliness and fear and pain which descends on one, which no human voice seems to be able to assuage, but which seems to be healed when you hear the voice of the still, small one who whispers gently in the silence of your own heart. Who longs to be seen and known within you. He who was before you came into being. And this encounter transforms you and it is slowly transforming me.

As Mother Teresa was apt to put it, God speaks in the silence of the heart. Now it is my challenge to go through these burning fires of inner conversion and allow my external life to follow suit, so that in my actions, in my words, in my thoughts, in my countenance, it is no longer I who live, but Christ in me.

I pray for opportunities to serve as she served. I long to serve as she served, here in my local community of Croydon. I pray that Croydon can be my Calcutta. It is surely a place just as desperately in need of God’s redeeming love as Calcutta was in Mother Teresa’s day, and continues to be.

“The poor will always be with you,” told us our saviour many years ago. And when we meet the poor in our own communities, he tells us that we meet him. Whatever we do to them, we do to him.

And the greatest poverty? Not lack of material wealth, not suffering under a supposed cost-of-living crisis. The real poverty is lack of love, lack of friendship, lack of community, nobody to speak to, nobody who listens to you, nobody who sees you for who you are. Nobody who knows you.

And isn’t this the great poverty of our time?

I pray for a revival in this nation, that this wellspring of love which drove Mother Teresa can well up in the hearts of the nation’s faithful and bring about a change in our own communities.

And may this change start with me. In what I do. In what I do to the least of these. In what I do to Him.

God bless you.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, pray for us!

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