WORCESTER

WHEN I WAS an undergraduate studying in Varanasi, India, some 20 years ago, I volunteered at a local hostel run by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. I had grandiose ideas about what I could do to help the nuns in their work. But my heroic ambitions had to be downsized when I was assigned the rather unheroic task of constructing a Christmas crèche. In fact, the closest I came to the nuns’ work was talking to a sister who had been assigned to help me — an act of mercy that also saved the Christmas crèche from what would have been an Easter debut.

The nun was just about my age, 21, and I expected her to be full of Christian zeal — a zeal that I wanted for myself and was desperately trying to find. But this young sister seemed surprisingly world-weary: I particularly remember her telling me about an injured old man who came to the hostel. She cleaned his wounds and bandaged them, but she admitted to me that she had to hold her nose to fight the stench. How hard it was, she told me, to see Jesus in the poor and the sick.

A couple years later, I briefly met Mother Teresa in a Missionaries of Charity home in the South Bronx. I was with a group of people who received rosaries from her and afterwards we all agreed that “Mother,” as she was called, had a palpable power and energy. I can remember thinking back to the young nun I spoke to that winter in India. My thoughts, as I recall, ran something like this: What the young nun experienced as painful struggle, Mother Teresa experienced as joyful labor; where the young nun had doubt, Mother Teresa had faith. The young nun and the elderly Mother Teresa: It was all part of an inevitable progression in which struggle would eventually be rewarded and doubt would give way to faith.

Those of us who only saw Mother Teresa from the outside now know that inside she was far more complicated. Perhaps her inner doubts and agonies, which have recently come to light, were connected to the very power and energy that I, along with others, sensed that day in the South Bronx. Mother Teresa had a seemingly boundless drive. A steely will was surely necessary for her to accomplish the founding of a religious order that would work in some of world’s most difficult places.

For these efforts, Mother Teresa was praised and adored. But in spite of her determination, and in spite of all the praise and adoration she received, there were still empty spaces inside her. And so in some of her more intimate writings, we find what approaches a negative outline of God, an inverse portrait rendered not by presence but by absence. I had always thought that Mother Teresa was saintly because of her super-human work for those who suffer. That she had a hidden life so filled with suffering shows how deeply she had united herself with those whom she served.

In this way, Mother Teresa’s sanctity is revealed in her humanity, in her painful experience of human limitation. She becomes more of a saint because of her hidden life, not in spite of it. Indeed, sometimes sharing our own hidden lives of pain, our experiences of inadequacy and disappointment, is the greatest gift we can give. This is the gift I received from that nun in India some 20 years ago. It is the gift that Mother Teresa is giving us now.

Mathew N. Schmalz teaches religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross.