Special from India: Mother Teresa: Divinely Human and Humanly Divine

Mother Teresa came to our nation as a bearer of Good News. She learned our languages. She accepted our culture. She wore our dress. She loved us. She prayed with us. She prayed for us. She appreciated us. She helped us. She became our own and we became her own. Because she became a mother to us in love and service which was and is deeply rooted in the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ.

P>GORAKHPUR, India (Catholic Online) - Today on the 26th August 2010 we are commemorating the 100th Birthday anniversary of Mother Teresa. We are first of all thanking God for His Grace in giving us Mother Teresa as a model and icon of divinity, humanity, charity, magnanimity, humility and spirituality.

Mother Teresa came to our nation as a bearer of Good News. She learned our languages. She accepted our culture. She wore our dress. She loved us. She prayed with us. She prayed for us. She appreciated us. She helped us. She became our own and we became her own. Because she became a mother to us in love and service which was and is deeply rooted in the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ.

The most valuable contribution Mother made to humanity is the awareness of the dignity of the poorest of the poor, revealing its concurrent divine dimension. Divinity and humanity or love of God and love of neighbor for her was never two things, nor were they opposite or contradictory. Rather, in her they were indispensable complementarities.

In other words, Mother Teresa offers to us an astoundingly mystical yet social path of discovering and internalizing the hidden treasure of salvation depicted in the Gospel, i.e., never separating Christ the hungry, Christ the thirsty, Christ the abandoned, Christ the abused and Christ the destitute from the hungry, thirsty, naked and the abandoned in our families and neighbourhood, near the city malls and luxury hotels, in front of the big educational institutions and around the hospitals. 

She humbly and sincerely sought the strength from the Cross of Jesus Christ for serving the lepers, the dying, the unclean, and the left out human beings. As God himself is universally available to all in his mercy and love, Mother Teresa crossed social, cultural, religious and political boundaries to unite humanity with divinity and nations with charity and fraternity bearing the torch of the dignity of the poor.

Through this path of prayer, charity and service she became a Mother to India and India gifted her to the world as a universal mother. Wherever she went she had a universal heart and an Indian appearance in her humble rustic sari.

The relevance of Mother Teresa for us today lies in the richness of her integral personality. What do I mean by that? It means she is a person suited to our global village as she belongs to all of us, irrespective of the man-made differences. Her relevance is also clear in the arena of offering a properly holistic spirituality.

That is because Mother unites in herself - and requests us to have in ourselves  - the quality of both humanity and divinity. We become truly spiritual and human only when we have hands, hearts, eyes and ears ready with sensitivity to reach out to the other as the image of God.

Mother Teresa both humanizes and divinizes us because she appeals to our life, conscience and choices in order to be God-oriented and other-oriented, leading to our own self-discovery that we are beautiful and life is beautiful when we learn to be properly inclusive of others in our daily life.

Thank you Mother;  for your sacrifice, example, and motherly heart. Continue to bless us with your intercession from Heaven so that we may learn to practice and imitate your virtues..

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Father Santhosh Sebastian Cheruvally holds a doctorate in Christology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and is a priest of the Diocese of Gorakhpur, in India. He is a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Gorakhpur and currently serves as the Parish Priest at St. Joseph's Cathedral, Gorakhpur and Principal of St. Joseph's School, Gorakhpur. This is an extract taken from the brochure published in the school to celebrate the Birth Centenary of Mother Teresa and is used with the special permission of the author.

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