Word: teresas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...early '50s, we non-Christian students at Loreto House were suspicious of Mother Teresa's motives in helping street children and orphans. Was she rescuing these children to convert them? Her antiabortion campaigns among homeless women were as easy for us to ignore as were the antiabortion lectures our nuns delivered twice weekly. The government had made even very young women aware of the consequences of population explosion...
...project of Mother Teresa's that confused us most was her care of the terminally ill destitute who came to the Kalighat Temple to die near a holy place. She wasn't interested in prolonging their life. What she railed against was the squalor and loneliness of their last hours. Her apparent dread of mortality and her obsession with dignified dying were at odds with Hindu concepts of reincarnation and death as a hoped-for release from maya, the illusory reality of worldly existence...
...pestilential. And so I could no longer be cynical about her motives. She wasn't just another Christian proselytizer. Her care of lepers changed the mind of many Calcuttans. Young physicians, one of them the uncle of a classmate, began to sign up as volunteers. It all made Mother Teresa seem less remote. The very people whom she had deserted when she broke with the Loreto nuns were now seeking...
...left Calcutta as a teenager and did not return to live there for any length of time until 1973. The Calcutta I went back to was vociferously in love with Mother Teresa. The women I had been close to in Loreto House, women who in the '70s had become socialite wives and volunteer social workers, were devoted to Mother Teresa and her projects, especially the leprosarium. Years later, I learned that the volunteer Mother Teresa came to rely on was a Loreto House graduate...
...fate of moral crusaders to be vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy or have the arbitrary selectiveness of their campaigns held against them. Mother Teresa's detractors have accused her of overemphasizing Calcuttans' destitution and of coercing conversion from the defenseless. In the context of lost causes, Mother Teresa took on battles she knew she could win. Taken together, it seems to me, the criticisms of her work do not undermine or topple her overall achievement. The real test might be, Did she inspire followers, skeptics and even opponents to larger acts of kindness or greater visions of possibility...