On 26th August 2010 we are commemorating the 100th Birth anniversary of Mother Teresa. We are first of all thanking God for His Grace in giving us Mother Teresa as a model and icon of divinity, humanity, charity, magnanimity, humility and spirituality.

Mother Teresa came to our nation as a bearer of Good News. She learnt our languages. She accepted our culture. She wore our dress. She loved us. She prayed with us. She prayed for us. She appreciated us. She helped us. She became our own and we became her own. Because she became a mother to us in love and service deeply rooted in the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ.

The most valuable contribution Mother has made to the humanity, according to me, is the awareness of the dignity of the poorest of the poor persons always with its concurrent divine dimension. Divinity and humanity or love of God and love of neighbour for her was never two things neither opposite nor contradictory, rather in her they were indispensable complementarities. In other words, Mother Teresa offers to us an astoundingly mystical yet social path of discovering and internalizing the hidden treasure of salvation depicted in the Gospel, i.e., never separating Christ the hungry, Christ the thirsty, Christ the abandoned, Christ the abused and Christ the destitute from the hungry, thirsty, naked and the abandoned in our families and neighbourhood, near the city malls and luxury hotels, in front of the big educational institutions and around the hospitals.

She humbly and sincerely sought the strength from the Cross of Jesus Christ for serving the lepers, the dying, the unclean, and the neglected human beings. As God himself is universally available to all in his mercy and love, Mother Teresa crossed social, cultural, religious and political boundaries to unite humanity with divinity and nations with charity and fraternity bearing the torch of the dignity of the poor. Through this path of prayer, charity and service she became a Mother to India and India gifted her to the world as a universal mother. Wherever she went she had a universal heart and an Indian appearance in her humble rustic sari.

The relevance of Mother Teresa for us today lies in the richness of her integral personality. What do I mean by that? It means she is a person suited to our global village as she belongs to all irrespective of the man-made differences. Her relevance is also in the area of offering an holistic spirituality. Because, Mother unites in herself and requests us to have in ourselves the quality of humanity and divinity. We become truly spiritual and human only when we have hands, hearts, eyes and ears with sensitivity to reach out to the other as the image of God.

Mother Teresa both humanizes and divinizes us because she appeals to our life, conscience and choices in order to be God-oriented and other-oriented, leading to our own self-discovery that we are beautiful, life is beautiful, when we learn to be inclusive in our daily life.

Thank you Mother for your sacrifice, example, motherly heart. Continue to Bless us with your intercession from Heaven so that we may learn to practice and imitate your virtues….

Quotes of Mother Teresa

• Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.
• Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.
• Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired.
• Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
• Each one of them is Jesus in disguise.
• Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.
• Everytime you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.
• God doesn't require us to succeed; he only requires that you try.
• Good works are links that form a chain of love.
• I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.
• I do not pray for success, I ask for faithfulness.
• I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.
• I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much.
• I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn't touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.
• I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbor. Do you know your next door neighbor?
• If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
• If we want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.
• If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.
• If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
• If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.
• In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.
• Intense love does not measure, it just gives.
• It is a kingly act to assist the fallen.
• It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.
• It is impossible to walk rapidly and be unhappy.
• It is not the magnitude of our actions but the amount of love that is put into them that matters.
• Jesus said love one another. He didn't say love the whole world.
• Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.
• Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.
• Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.
• Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace. Money will come if we seek first the Kingdom of God - the rest will be given.
• Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go.
• Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.
• Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.
• Loneliness is the most terrible poverty.
• Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do... but how much love we put in that action.
• Love begins by taking care of the closest ones - the ones at home.
• Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within reach of every hand.
• Many people mistake our work for our vocation. Our vocation is the love of Jesus.
• One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.
• Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them.
• Peace begins with a smile.
• Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier.
• Sweetest Lord, make me appreciative of the dignity of my high vocation, and its many responsibilities. Never permit me to disgrace it by giving way to coldness, unkindness, or impatience.
• The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.
• The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.
• The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.
• The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.
• The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.
• The success of love is in the loving - it is not in the result of loving. Of course it is natural in love to want the best for the other person, but whether it turns out that way or not does not determine the value of what we have done.
• There are no great things, only small things with great love.
• There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in - that we do it to God, to Christ, and that's why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.
• There is more hunger in the world for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.
• There must be a reason why some people can afford to live well. They must have worked for it. I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things that we could use.
• We are all pencils in the hand of God.
• We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.
• We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.
• We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.
• Words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.