“I do this because I believe I am doing it for Jesus. I am very sure that this is his work. I am very sure. I am very sure that is He and not me.”
“Once I gave a prayer to a communist and he took it back to his family and the children started to pray. When he saw me again he said, “Mother you don’t know how your prayer and picture have disturbed the whole family. The children want to know who God is. They want to know why Mother is speaking this way.” The children are hungry. This is why we need to pray together.”
“I once picked up a child of six or seven in the street and took her to Shishu Bhavin (a children’s home) and gave her a bath, some clothes and some nice food. That evening the child ran away. We took the child in a second and a third time, and she ran away. After the third time I sent a Sister to follow her. The Sister found the child sitting with her mother and sister under a tree. There was a little dish there and the mother was cooking food she had picked up from the streets. There were cooking there, they were eating there, they were sleeping there. It was their home. And then we understood why the child ran away. The mother just loved that child and the child loved the mother. They were so beautiful to each other. The child said ‘bari jabo’ – it was her home. Her mother was her home.”
“A family in Australia with six or seven children talked together and decided not to buy a new television. They wanted to enjoy each other more completely. They had enough of what they needed for each other in each other. Instead of buying the television, they gave the money to me to do something for the poor Aborigines there. They overcame something they thought divided them, an obstacle to the joy of loving. And they recognized the sharing, the talking, the laughing, the loving, the teasing. The whole family is simply delighted.”
“At Christmas I was talking to our lepers and telling them that the leprosy is a gift from God. That God can trust them so much that he gives them this terrible suffering. And they were so lonely like Jesus felt when he came. He was also very lonely because as a human being he was away from the Father. And one man, who was completely disfigured, started pulling at my sari. ‘Repeat that,’ he said. ‘Repeat that this is God’s love. Those who are suffering understand you when you talk like this, Mother Teresa.’ Christ is really living his passion in these homes. In our people we see Calvary.”
“I never look at the masses as my responsibility. I look at the individual. I can love only one person at a time. I can feed one person at a time. Just one, one, one. You get closer to Christ by coming closer to each other. As Jesus said, “Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do to me.” So you begin. I picked up one person – maybe if I didn’t pick up that one person, I would not have picked up 42,000.”