Many Children Are Not All Right. What Are We Going to Do? 

M alcolm Muggeridge noticed that Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charities, her order of religious sisters in India, had joy. “Spending a few days with you, I have been immensely struck by the joyfulness of these sisters who do what an outsider might think to be almost impossibly difficult and painful tasks,” the British atheist journalist said to her in 1968 as he was working on a documentary and a book, both titled “Something Beautiful for God.” That BBC interview introduced her to the world. Before that, she was simply a woman loving.

“That’s the spirit of our society, that total surrender, loving trust and cheerfulness,” she explained.

We must be able to radiate the joy of Christ, express it in our actions. If our actions are just useful actions that give no joy to people, our poor people would never be able to rise up to the call which we want them to hear, that call to come closer to God. We want to make them feel that they are loved. If we went to them with a sad face, we would only make them more depressed.

She further told Muggeridge that the people the sisters were serving were not charity cases — the sisters were not the equivalent of an NGO providing supplies to the poorest of the poor. The poverty they were seeking to address went far deeper than that.

It is not very often things they need. What they need much more is what we offer them. In these twenty years of work amongst the people, I have come more and more to realize that it is being unwanted that is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience. Nowadays we have found medicine for leprosy and lepers can be cured. For all kinds of diseases there are medicines and cures. But for being unwanted, except there are willing hands to serve and there’s a loving heart to love, I don’t think this terrible disease can be cured.

Muggeridge prompted her to talk about all the children he saw being cared for by the Missionaries of Charity:

Many of those children are unwanted by their parents; some we pick, some we get from hospitals: they have been left there by their parents. Some we bring from the jail, some are brought to us by the police. By whatever means they are brought to us, up to now we have never refused a child.

Muggeridge observed that the sisters did looked upon these people who felt unloved or were cast aside not as pitiable but as “marvelous people.” For anyone today encountering on the streets of Manhattan mentally ill homeless people or immigrants with no connections, for example, this seems as relevant as ever. Mother Teresa explained that the difference between social work and what the sisters surrendered their lives to was not something but Somebody. “This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in, that we give it and we do it to God, to Christ, and that’s why we try to do it as beautifully as possible . . . here in the slums, in the broken body, in the children, we see Christ and we touch him.”

There’s another documentary that was in theaters last year, Mother Teresa: No Greater Love, released by the Knights of Columbus. September 5 was the anniversary of her death, and I found myself watching it again. It would be a great help to our culture if more people did. I know I am not alone in being frustrated by the onset of another presidential election — and even before we confront the possibility of a Biden–Trump rematch. Neither should be running for president again. And that we seem to have these endless presidential campaigns creates incentives for everyone to prove his or her ideological purity, rhetorically destroy potential opponents, and not get much of anything constructive done.

During the recent Republican debate, I was heartened to hear two candidates talk about adoption. Even that has become politicized and racialized and sexualized. The witness of Mother Teresa — who died only 26 years ago — not only urges us to ensure that no child left behind to abortion. She also challenges us to make sure there are no children in foster care. That should be an issue that unites, not divides.

This shouldn’t seem miraculous, but just after Mother Teresa’s anniversary, two Washington Post columnists wrote a commentary piece that was the fruit of an effort to find policy ground where they could come together to help women and children after the end of Roe v. Wade. One of the things they highlighted is that a number of legislative initiatives already in Congress should be places where “pro-life” and “pro-choice” people can meet. They could agree on issues of maternal health, paid family leave, and simple resources for college students and other pregnant women to find help to choose life, if that’s what they wanted, rather than be coerced by circumstances and culture. I couldn’t help but think Mother Teresa would embrace them if she could. She famously warned Washington, D.C., at the National Prayer Breakfast about the danger to the soul, to a nation, of abortion. She talked about the importance of family. She did so in a spirit of love and hope and with a boldness that we could afford to catch.

I watched the No Greater Love documentary this year and felt this urgent rallying call to get serious. There is so much ridiculous anger on one side or another. The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks used to say that the greatest ecumenical work happens among those working together helping people. It’s the Mother Teresa model, which, Muggeridge noted, was the Gospel being lived in the world. As you may know, at 79, he converted to Catholicism, because he saw the real deal of love in the world. We need more of that credible witness.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.