Christ the Cornerstone

Mother Teresa reminds us, without love we cannot serve others

The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. (St. Teresa of Calcutta)

Today, Sept. 5, our Church invites us to remember St. Teresa of Calcutta, who ministered to the poorest of the poor on the streets of Calcutta (Kolkata), the capital of West Bengal, India. By the time of her death in 1997, she served the poor in 610 houses of the Missionaries of Charity located throughout the world.

Mother Teresa, as she was known to her Sisters, began her religious life as a Sister of Loretto who taught in a school for girls in India for 20 years.

On a train to Calcutta in 1946, she heard the voice of Christ saying to her, “I thirst.” Afterward, she received permission to establish a new religious order, the Missionaries of Charity, and she began her work among the gravely ill and dying poor in the most destitute region of Calcutta.

Mother Teresa was small in stature, but she was oversized in her ability to serve others. Among her many admonitions to her Sisters (and all of us), she is quoted as saying: “Peace begins with a smile,” and “We can only do small things with great love because it’s not the magnitude of the action but the love put into it that truly matters.”

She also stressed that “the most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved” and that “love begins at home by caring for those closest to us.”

Mother Teresa once wrote to the members of her religious order, “I have asked but one grace for you, that you may understand the words of Jesus: Love one another as I have loved you.” Love is not something abstract or sentimental. It is a series of actions selflessly given “to Jesus, with Jesus, and for Jesus.”

“We cannot truly love and serve the poor,” Mother said, “unless we have that love of God in our hearts. We will only have that if we are empty of all selfishness and insincerity. This love must start at home. Ask Jesus to give you his heart to love with.” Unless and until this love is among us, Mother Teresa believed, we can kill ourselves with work, but it will be only work, not love. “Work without love is slavery,” she said.

True love demands that we empty ourselves of selfishness and sin. It also requires that we seek to imitate the love of Jesus, who emptied himself of everything that would prevent him from doing the will of his Father.

As Mother Teresa wrote to her community (recorded in “The Writings of Mother Teresa of Calcutta”):

Jesus gave his life to love us and tells us that we also have to give whatever it takes to do good to one another. … Jesus died on the cross because that is what it took for him to do good to us; to save us from our selfishness and sin. He gave up everything to do the Father’s will, to show us that we too must be willing to give up everything to do God’s ways, to love one another as he loves each one of us. That is why we too must give to each other until it hurts. It is not enough for us to say I love God, but I also have to love my neighbor.

For St. Teresa, “giving until it hurts” was not just a figure of speech. Her letters and personal reflections reveal the depths of anguish and uncertainty she experienced even as her strong faith and determination kept her from being overwhelmed by the challenges she faced on a daily basis. Love is action, not emotion, and that is why it must be expressed in concrete forms of selfless service.

“Do not think that love in order to be genuine has to be extraordinary,” Mother Teresa said. “What we need is to love without getting tired. Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.”

To love without getting tired, we need the grace of Christ freely given to us in the Eucharist. Every day, at the eucharistic banquet of our Lord, Mother Teresa found the strength she needed to minister to the desperately poor people she served.

As we continue to celebrate the 2025 Jubilee as Pilgrims of Hope, let’s pray for the courage to love selflessly as St. Teresa of Calcutta did. May her words of wisdom and hope guide us through the challenges of loving and serving others as Jesus taught us. †