Mother Teresa brief biography

Saint Teresa of Calcutta was one of the most revered people of the 20th century. She was born in Skopje, Albania in 1910 as Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, but would become familiarly known the world over as Mother Teresa.

At the tender age of eighteen, she left home for Ireland to join the Sisters of Loreto. There she learned English in advance of going to Darjeeling, India to train and prepare for missionary work. As a sister, she took the name Teresa after Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. She served as a teacher for nearly twenty years at the Loreto convent school in Calcutta, where she became headmistress in 1944. 

In September 1946, Teresa returned to Darjeeling for an annual retreat. It was on this trip she received “the call within the call” as she would later put it. “I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith.”
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She soon began missionary work with the poor of Calcutta and in 1950 received permission from the Vatican for a new order called the Missionaries of Charity. Mother Teresa would grow the Missionaries of Charity over the course of five decades into a worldwide congregation active in 120 countries with of over 4,500 religious sisters and untold numbers of volunteers.

In 1979, Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize. Four years later she survived her first heart attack, marking the beginning of the cardiac problems that would plague her last years. In March of 1997, with her health continuing to grow weaker, Teresa stepped down from her leadership role with the Missionaries of Charity. She died six month later, on September 5. She was canonized on September 4, 2016.

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Find Your Own Calcutta

All great peacemakers share one thing in common; they all answer a call that leads on a journey towards moral justice. The great mythologist Joseph Campbell spoke of “The Hero’s Journey.” In studying myths and religious stories across the globe and throughout history, Campbell noted strong similarities in the pattern these epic narratives followed. He furthered theorized that this story-telling structure is so compelling because The Hero’s Journey is precisely what we all quietly yearn for in our own lives.

This is what makes Mother Teresa’s life so fascinating to us. Sure, few of us would want to travel down the same path of her passion. We do, however, want to discover and follow the path of our own passion.

The life of Mother Teresa provides a vivid example of this timeless epic journey. Each Hero’s Journey, according to Campbell, includes the stages of: Separation, Initiation, and Return. Each of these stages is prominently evident in Teresa’s heroic journey to sainthood.

The Separation Stage describes the figure’s acceptance of a calling and a separation from the familiar and comfortable to the unknown and challenging. For young Gonxhe (Teresa’s given birth name), this separation occurred with her calling to pursue a life as a missionary with the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland. It was punctuated by the literal separation from her family in Albania at age eighteen. In fact, she would never again see her mother or sister. 

From this point, Gonxhe’s Initiation Stage began. It included learning English and Bengali, moving to India, pledging vows, and taking a new name. It doesn’t get more initiatory than that. For nearly twenty years while Teresa was teaching at a school in Calcutta near her convent, the pervasive poverty of the city’s slums gnawed at her conscience. In September 1946, Teresa left Calcutta for an annual retreat. It was on this trip she received “the call within the call” to help the poor.

Thus, a new journey began. With the new calling, came a new initiation. Fittingly, she adopted new attire. She replaced the Loreto habit with a rough cotton sari with a blue border. After founding a new school in Calcutta, she began her mission to tend to the poor.

All initiations, however, include trials and hers would be no exception. Venturing into the slums, she experienced first-hand the pain, hunger, fatigue, and hopelessness of the destitute. The potential to return to the relative comfort of the Loreto convent tempted her. Nevertheless, she continued on her mission to serve the “poorest of the poor.” 

Soon, twelve women joined Teresa’s cause and the Vatican granted her permission for a new congregation, the Missionaries of Charity. In her words, the new congregation would care for “the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone.”

For the next forty-seven years she served as the head of the Missionaries of Charity. Fluent in five languages, her efforts knew few boundaries. She cared for earthquake survivors in Armenia, starving orphans in Ethiopia, and visited evacuees from the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Perhaps her most audacious venture occurred in Beirut, Lebanon where she rescued thirty-seven mentally ill children from a war zone hospital. Most observers and advisers considered the effort suicidal, but Teresa successfully forged ahead. 
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In nearly five decades, her congregation had come to canvas the globe in service to the disadvantaged. The Return Stage on the Hero’s Journey had been reached. Mother Teresa had heard and accepted the call, faced the initiations and trials, and had returned with the boon to humanity. Her journey was certainly not a direct one. There were twists, turns, and restarts. In fact, she even secretly agonized about her faith in God through most of it.
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Nevertheless, the impact she had both directly and through her inspiration was extraordinary. One inspired nun wrote Mother Teresa to ask how she might also come to help the poor of Calcutta. Mother Teresa replied, “Stay where you are. Find your own Calcutta...You can find Calcutta all over the world if you have eyes to see.”
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Indeed, each of us has our own “Calcutta” calling. We might think of our own Calcutta as our personal heartache. Mother Teresa showed us that when this personal heartache is married together with our unique heartthrob—our true passion—the key is found to unlock the magic of the Hero’s Journey.