Mother Teresa

To the sister who found Christ in the dying.

She left a comfortable teaching order to work in the slums of Calcutta with no money and no plan, and founded the Missionaries of Charity. Her letters, published after her death, revealed that she spent nearly fifty years in spiritual darkness while doing it.

The Prayer

St. Teresa of Calcutta,
you saw Christ in people the world stepped over,
and you served Him there for fifty years
without feeling His presence once.

Pray for me when prayer is dry
and I am tempted to think it is therefore useless.

Give me your eyes: for the person in front of me,
not for the cause in general.
Give me your hands, which did small things with great love.

And give me your stubbornness in the dark. Amen.

Her Words

Not all of us can do great things.
But we can do small things with great love.

About This Devotion

Her feast is 5 September. The revelation of her long interior darkness troubled some and consoled far more: it is possible to be a saint and to feel nothing whatever, for decades, and to keep going anyway.