Vered’s Blog

One woman’s name stands above all as a symbol of compassion and service leadership and she is Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa embodies and symbolizes many of the Feminine Leadership values – compassion, service, devotion, humbleness, nurturing and most important – love.

Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia, in the former Yugoslavia, she was the youngest of three children. In her teens, Agnes became a member of a youth group in her local parish called Sodality. Through her involvement with their activities guided by a Jesuit priest, Agnes became interested in missionaries.

At age 17, she responded to her first call of a vocation as a Catholic missionary nun. She joined an Irish order, the Sisters of Loretto, a community known for their missionary work in India. When she took her vows as a Sister of Loretto, she chose the name Teresa after St. Therese of Lisieux.

In 1948, Mother Teresa came across a half-dead woman lying in front of a Calcutta hospital. She stayed with the woman until she died. From that point on, Mother Teresa dedicated the majority of her life to helping the poorest of the poor in India, thus gaining her the name “Saint of the Gutters.”

For over 50 years, she worked selflessly helping the poor. That devotion towards the poor won her respect throughout the world and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. Mother Teresa is stated to have said that earthly rewards were important only if they helped her help the world’s needy.

Mother Teresa once said that “At the end of our lives, we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made or how many great things we have done. We will be judged by ‘I was hungry and you gave me to eat. I was naked and you clothed me. I was homeless and you took me in.’

Accepting the Nobel peace prize in the name of the “unwanted, unloved and uncared for,” she wore the same $1 white sari that she had adopted to identify herself with the poor when she founded her order, Missionaries of Charity.

Mother Teresa work in Calcutta’s slums illustrated something that the high priests of global development often tend to overlook: in order to pull people out of poverty, it is important to first empower them with self-esteem and with the hope that change is always possible.

Mother Teresa created a global network of homes for the poor, from the slums of Calcutta to the ghettos of New York, including one of the first homes for AIDS victims. Misery had a formidable and unrelenting opponent in Mother Teresa; whether it was in Ethiopia tending to the hungry or in the squalid townships of South Africa, Calcutta’s “angel of mercy” was there.

In India and beyond, Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity devoted their time to the blind, the disabled, the aged, and the poor. She opened schools, orphanages and homes for the needy, and turned her attention to the victims of AIDS as that disease increased in prevalence. By 1996, she was operating 517 missions in more than 100 countries.

Perhaps, French President Jacques Chirac summed up Mother Teresa’s legacy best when he said after her death: “This evening, there is less love, less compassion, less light in the world.”

May we live up to her values and bring more love and compassion to our own little world. Our family, our friends and our work environment. If each of us would be willing to bring just a bit more of those qualities, each day to her environment – the world would be certainly a better place.

Have a great day!