Mother Teresa - An Embodiment Of Love

September 5, 2017, marks the 20th death anniversary of Mother Teresa.

- Albert Thyrniang

Whether holding a child in her arms or embracing an infirm, or administering to a sick person or assisting the destitute, giving a speech or simply beholding her countenance, Mother Teresa conveyed one simple but powerful message — love and compassion. Her words, her works and her life replicated God’s love and compassion to the poor and those in pain. The “living saint” in her lifetime, was officially declared a saint by Pope Francis at St Peter’s Square on 4 September 2016, eighteen years after her death.

Born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje, now Republic of Macedonia, then part of Kosovo, on 26 August 1910, she moved to Ireland and later came to India to work as a teacher in Calcutta. She was a Loreto nun until that “inspiration day” in 1946. Distressed at the poverty in the “City of Joy”, while on a train from Calcutta to Darjeeling, she received the “call within a call”. Responding to this call was certainly a conscious action of love to serve the poorest of the poor. With a humble beginning of an open-air school for homeless children, she later moved to slums, visited poor families, washed the sores of children, cared for the ailing, old and infirm and nursed the destitute dying of terminal illnesses in her shelter homes.