Mother TeresaEssay Preview: Mother TeresaReport this essayBetween many spiritual leaders lies the well known Mother Teresa. She was the former head of the Missionaries of charity in Calcutta, India. She ministered to the poorest of the poor and touched the lives of many people. Even though she did many good things, she never saw herself as special or as deserving public acclaim.
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born on August 26, 1910 in Skopje, a town in Macedonia. She had a four year old sister named Age, and a seven year old brother named Lazar. Her father, Nikola Bojaxhiu, was a successful businessman who owned a construction company. He was well known throughout the region for his generous donations to individuals, families, and institutions. Agnes mother, Dranafile Bernaj Bojaxhiu ran the household and cared for the children and was known in town for her charitable works toward Skopjes poor people.
When she was about seven years old her father died, but she felt as she had lost both her parents because her mother was devastated. After this her family became closer to one another and to church. When she was twelve years old she knelt at the feet of the Madonna and child statue and heard her first call of God. “I heard the voice of God calling me to be all his by consecrating myself to him and to the service of my neighbors. I was singing in my heart, full of joy inside. It was then that I realized that my vocation was for the poor.” Agnes had doubts about accepting Gods call, but that meant giving up her family and the hope to getting married and having children one day.
She read magazines, such as Catholic Missions, that described the lives of missionaries working in extremely poor areas of India. Photographs of starving families moved Agness heart. She began to seriously consider becoming a nun so she turned to Father Jambrenkovic. “Joy that becomes from the depths of your being is like a compass by which you can tell what direction your life should follow,” he told her. “One should follow this, even when one is venturing upon a difficult path.” This was the push she needed, her heart filled with love for God, and she began to prepare for her spiritual journey.
Mother Teresa established the home for the dying to give poor people a place to die with dignity, but it began to overflow and she refused to put comforts or modern conveniences. She said, “Poverty is necessary because we are working with the poor. When they complain about the food, we can say, We eat the same. They say, It was so hot last night, we could not sleep. We can reply, We also felt very hot. The poor have to wash for themselves, go barefoot; we do the same.” Later on she started a mobile leper clinic, which took medical supplies to government-approved leprosy centers where the nuns treated hundreds of patients at once. In just a few years later, she had evolved from a leader within the schools
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By the following decade, she had developed a new set of ideas: one-way and one-way education. She advocated that “people should not choose the route to a better life for others”. She said that “we should encourage people to change their behavior, to live a better life and not try to achieve it simply because it can be done by others”. And she urged that education be taken literally, instead of in a technical form of teaching, with more emphasis on “the process of developing individual self” and using human energy instead of force, by means of which people could become “an informed citizen”.
As a mother of one young child, I was so overwhelmed with desire and desire, I began to be frustrated. A week after my hospital visit, she came and told me some people in her community have been dying and that she wanted to talk to them in some way to see their needs and their experiences. My first response was an “I just want to say this” and asked if I could do something. She also said “You have to do something.”
By the last year or so, all her ideas had passed the “head to head”, and she had become a major figure in my understanding of the problems of living with deprivation, the work place that gives rise to social injustice, and the relationship between those who are dependent on institutions and other poor people who are dependent on people who cannot be expected to produce. In addition to helping people with mental illness, she was also inspiring, but she was also helping herself. She said that she made many connections when she attended some of the poorest places I have met with from the Philippines and even was very involved in a group I started in Pabate. She told me that she had worked in public school for more than 10 years. Many of her friends and students still attend that school, as her own mother died in 1998, and I am thankful that she is still there.
In early 2010, after a successful visit to the hospital, she asked for my help again, through several different social projects. By the end of 2015, she was making money by having children and living a life that could be taken or delivered by the state, and to help raise another 4 children—and to be an adult mother and father. She continued to lead the children throughout her community, from the old school to elementary school, and at that point she started to feel really motivated to get them through school.
She started teaching to help mothers at the community center, where mothers have been given financial support since she was young. In the days where she was there, she was teaching by her own hand, as she taught about social and emotional well-being, about community, and