Mother Theresa, 3

"It was while she was teaching at the Loreto convent school in Calcutta that the second great break in Mother Teresa's life took place; the call within a call, as she puts it. She had occasion to go into some of the very poorest streets of Calcutta - and where are there any poorer - and suddenly realized that she belonged there, not in her Loreto convent with its pleasant garden, eager schoolgirls, congenial colleagues and rewarding work. Again the only impediment to her new vocation was the happiness and happy relationships it required her to relinquish. It might seem strange to regard any religious order as an unduly easeful existence, but that was how Mother Teresa saw it in contrast with the lives of the very poor in Calcutta. She had to wait for some two years to be released from the vows she had already taken in order to be able to go back into the world, there to take even stricter vows of her own devising. Ecclesiastical authority, I should add, is something that she accepts in the same unquestioning way that peasants accept the weather, or sailors storms at sea. It would never occur to her either to venerate or to challenge it. She just waited patiently. When at last her release came, she stepped out with a few rupees in her pocket, made her way to the poorest, wretchedest quarter of the city, found a lodging there, gathered together a few abandoned children- there were plenty to choose from - and began her ministry of love."
- Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God

Mother Theresa, 2

Time: Humble as you are, it must be an extraordinary thing to be a vehicle of God's grace in the world.

Mother Teresa: But it is His work. I think God wants to show His greatness by using nothingness.

Time: You are nothingness?

Mother Teresa: I'm very sure of that.

Time: You feel you have no special qualities?

Mother Teresa: I don't think so. I don't claim anything of the work. It's His work. I'm like a little pencil in His hand. That's all. He does the thinking. He does the writing. The pencil has nothing to do it. The pencil has only to be allowed to be used. In human terms, the success of our work should not have happened, no? That is a sign that it's His work, and that He is using others as instruments - all our Sisters. None of us could produce this. Yet see what He has done.

Mother Theresa

"Do you know something? In Calcutta all we need is a little rice and some medicine, but here they suffer a worse kind of hunger; here they hunger for love."
Madre Teresa

"The fruit of faith is love, and the fruit of love is service."