September 5
Saint Teresa of Calcutta
Today's Gospel: Luke
6:1-5
Today’s Gospel:
Luke 6:1-5
(Debate About The Sabbath)
Reflection:
Today the Church remembers Saint
Teresa of Calcutta, a woman who left a comfortable teaching post to walk into
the poorest streets of India with nothing but a habit and a conviction that
Christ was hiding in "the poorest of the poor." No funding plan. No
institutional backing beyond her bishop's blessing. No illusions about how the
world would read her, a woman scooping dying strangers off the pavement was, to
plenty of onlookers, simply foolish. Paul knew that look from the inside. We
are fools for Christ's sake; he tells the Corinthians. We are weak. We are held
in disrepute. We are the very refuse of the world, its rubbish, even now.
Mother Teresa lived that verse with her hands. She didn't reframe poverty and
dying into something respectable. She knelt down in the middle of it, because
that's where she believed Christ Himself was found.
Back in the 1980s, my friend Jerry
Kelly visited Mother Teresa in Calcutta, and he brought the rosaries I had made for
her. I never got to kneel beside her the way she knelt beside the dying, but
somehow, a string of beads I made with my own hands ended up in hers. I've
never forgotten that. It's a small thing next to a lifetime spent among the
poorest of the poor, but it's a reminder that you don't have to be in Calcutta
to hand something of yourself to Christ. Sometimes He just needs someone
willing to carry it there for you.
The Gospel gives us a quieter
version of that same collision between appearances and truth. The Pharisees see
the disciples plucking grain on the Sabbath and object, not because anyone is
starving, but because the rule as they understood it has been broken. Jesus
doesn't argue the fine print. He points them to David eating the bread of the
Presence, bread only priests were allowed to touch, and reminds them the Son of
Man is Lord even of the Sabbath. Mercy outranks ritual when the ritual has
forgotten who it was made to serve. That was Mother Teresa's whole ministry in
one sentence. She was criticized for going into slums no one else would enter,
for touching bodies others recoiled from, for putting dignity ahead of
procedure. She understood, same as Jesus in that grain field, that the law
exists to serve love, never the other way around.
Twenty to thirty years ago, that
Gospel would've landed differently. Sundays were sacred back then. Respected,
not only for worship, but as a day of rest for most workers. Since then, we see
businesses run seven days a week, and it's rare to find anyone publicly
honoring Sunday anymore, though some establishments do. Look at Mass attendance
overall; it’s sad, so many people are too busy on Sundays now. The Pharisees clung
too tightly to the ritual. Our world has let go of it almost completely.
Different failure, same root: forgetting who the day is for.
That's exactly why our personal
prayer life matters now, more than ever before. Go to Mass, and get involved in
your parish and community, and try to evangelize
all you can. But underneath all of that, make sure to build a private prayer
life, devout, in-depth, almost saintly, running seven days a week, not just the
one the world still half-remembers. Something so natural to you that if Sunday
disappears entirely from public life, Jesus is still waiting for you at home,
one on one. That private life is where He sees who you really are behind closed
doors. Mother Teresa's holiness didn't start on the streets of Calcutta. It
started on her knees, alone, long before anyone was watching.
And that same mercy-over-ritual
principle holds when life gets brutal. Rent's due, five kids are at the table,
and there's no food, but you're holding the cash. Do you not delay the payment,
eat the late fee, and feed your family first? Of course you do. Our family’s needs
outrank every other obligation, every time. Sacrifice is love's foundation.
You don't have to talk about it, just do it.
There is a shrine tucked into the woods near L'Ariccia called Our Lady of the Woods. It started with a shepherd
boy named Santi, who wasn't looking for anything holy, just picking berries,
when he fell into a bramble and found a forgotten tile of the Madonna, painted
generations earlier and left to be swallowed by weeds. Mother Teresa found her
own hidden Madonna, not in brambles, but in the faces of the dying no one else
would kneel beside. Santi rebuilt a ruined shrine one stone at a time because
he refused to walk past what he'd found. Mother Teresa rebuilt human dignity
one body at a time, for the same reason. Neither waited for the world to notice
before doing what love required.
Where have you let the rule,
the routine, or just the noise of a busy world become more important than the
person right in front of you, or Jesus waiting quietly for you at the altar?
Rosary Man
Jim 🌹
Freely
given. Freely shared.
