One of the most influential and famous persons over the last 100 years wasn’t an athlete, wasn’t a celebrity, wasn’t a political figure, but was a simple, short, four-foot-nothing religious nun from Albania. She would come to be affectionately known as Mother Teresa.
At the age of 18, she left home and joined the convent of Loretto Sisters in Ireland. She was sent to Calcutta, India, to teach at a school for upper middle-class girls. While she loved teaching these girls, she was increasingly disturbed by the extreme poverty she saw outside the school walls.
One day on a train ride in 1946, she heard a call from within her conscience to serve the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. She would go on to call this “the call within the call.” Having already been called to religious life, this was a call to something more. She later wrote, “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.”
She began one day on her own, with a few bandages, clothes, and food, she went out into the city to care for those in need. Soon others joined her including other Loretto Sisters and girls from the school. She would found a new religious order, the Missionaries of Charity, to care for the poorest of the poor throughout the world.
She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and died in 1997 and was canonized a saint in 2016. There are now over 5,700 Missionaries of Charity with convents all over the world.
In every Missionary of Charity convent, there is a crucifix in the chapel. And under the right arm and transept of the cross are the words “I Thirst.” These were some of the last words Christ said from the cross. Mother Teresa reflected on these words often and believed that Jesus wasn’t thirsting for something to drink, but rather his thirst was for our love, love from each and every one of us.
God entered into our broken fallen world, something he didn’t have to do. He did this out of his sheer graciousness and love for us. Jesus gave everything he had throughout his life, day in and day out until finally he entered into Jerusalem one last time, was betrayed, arrested, mocked, humiliated, tortured, and crucified. He literally gave all of himself, exhausted himself so that we would know his love for us and choose to love him in return.
God gave us free will. Each of us can choose to know, love, and serve him or choose to ignore and reject him. Jesus wants us to freely choose to love him. Mother Teresa wanted to satiate Jesus’ thirst by praying, by worshiping him, by loving him by loving the poorest of the poor.
Another favorite of her teachings was what she called, the “Gospel on five fingers.” She would repeat Jesus’ words from Matthew’s Gospel of the judgment of the nations. When Jesus said, “Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” And she would point to one finger for each word as she said, “you did it to me.”
We satiate Jesus’ thirst by fulfilling the greatest commandment of loving God with our whole heart, mind, and soul and our neighbor as ourself. We love God by worshiping him, by offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. And we love our neighbor as ourself by seeing him as another Christ in the world and realizing that when we love another, we did it to Jesus!
It’s important that we reflect on this reality often, that Jesus created you good, redeemed you, and desires your friendship. He thirsts for your love. Only your love for him will satiate his thirst.
Father Nick Nelson is pastor of Queen of Peace and Holy Family parishes in Cloquet and director of vocations for the Diocese of Duluth. He studied at The Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Rome. Reach him at [email protected].