Mother Teresa Channeling Peace

MOTHER TERESA THE PEACEMAKER

"Let God use you without consulting you."

She's come a long way to India as a beautiful young postulant, age 29, from Communist Yugoslavia (see photo below the breakup).   

Through her hard work for the poor, for giving love and dignity in dying, she was rewarded with many awards and honorary degrees from all places.  Her first, a diplomatic passport from Vatican City, the smallest country in the world.  She was the most traveled nun that anyone could think of, maybe more than any world leader, and her destinations were always the poor side of town.  She said, "Our poverty is our dowry."  In one journey alone, she would be granted five visas, along with it a diplomatic immunity.  Not that she needed it.   

Of all her awards and accolades, the most notable was probably the Nobel Peace Prize.  When others have become a recipient just by magic and no remarkable or significant accomplishment (you know who I'm alluding to), hers was not so fast.  After all, the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to political leaders and jailed protesters.  She was first nominated in 1975 by Shirley Williams of the British Governmet and lost to Andrei Sacharov.  Then in 1977, her name was re-submitted and lost again. When a friend expressed disappointment, Mother Teresa just said, "I had a good laugh over the Nobel Prize -it will come only when Jesus thinks it is time."  Finally, upon Robert S. McNamara's persistence, former U.S. Secretary of Defense and World Bank President at the time,re-submitted her name again and this time - three times was a charm.  She got it.  A nun had been awarded by the Nobel Committee.  She said, "I am unworthy.  Thank God for the gifts to the poor."  She would give her $193,000 prize to the poor of India.

Although she kept receiving awards through the years she would only say, "I don't care" in receiving them or something like that.  Excuse me if I make you think she's being ungrateful.  She was not into media publicity or her pictures being taken neither.  When she came to the United States in 1970 (1971?), she was to be interviewed at the NBC Today Show by Barbara Walters, then the host of the morning show.  Ms. Walters, who interviewed revolutionary leaders like her friend Fidel Castro, would only have time for Mother Teresa for 6 minutes!  What was so appalling was, she was bumped to an earlier time slot to accomodate a harpist.  

" At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diploma we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done.  We will be judged by "I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was naked and you clothed me.  I was homeless and you took me in."