Wyatt North - Mother Teresa: A Life Inspired

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In 1979, someone asked a small, elderly woman, who was dressed in a simple, perhaps odd-looking, blue and white dress, what an individual could do to promote peace in the world. The woman quickly answered: Go home and love your family. Coming from such an individual, one might find the answer simple and even a bit nave. However, this woman was not just any woman; she was Mother Teresa. At the time, she was the leader of a wildly successful international religious community, served as a beacon of hope for the world, and had recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Obviously, she was not nave, and she did possess expertise on promoting peace in the world. So what could this seemingly simple response mean?

As we will see in the chapters that follow, Mother Teresa always lived a life in which she was at home and loving her family. This might seem like a strange claim since Mother Teresa constantly traveled the globe, helping the poor and needy around the world. However, this fact should not lead us to discount her claim. Rather, it should encourage us to see in her answer something more than meets the eyesomething more complex than what the words might first imply.

Throughout her life, Mother Teresa worked to transform our ideas of home, love, and family. As a figure of the 20th century, she saw the rapid changes taking place in the world and among its people, and she was intuitive enough to know that Catholicism, as well as its missionary work, would need to re-imagine itself in order to meet newly emerging and diverse needs. However, she brought about transformation in a simple and unassuming way. She simply asked individuals to contemplate the meaning of ideas such as home, love, and family and to be open to new conceptions of these terms in the midst of our changing world. In doing so, Mother Teresa introduced a new, modern way of doing missionary work, led an international religious organization, and was beloved by people the world over for the work she did out of love for her family, which would one day grow to include all of humanity.

Chapter One: Mother Teresas Origins

In August of 1910, in the town of Skopje, in what is today the Republic of Macedonia, a tiny baby named Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu came into the world. She was born into an Albanian Catholic family during the calm of the earliest days of the twentieth century, in those brief moments before two World Wars would tear Europe apart, before the threat of communism would consume the West, and before decolonization movements the world over would redraw maps time and time again. This child would never grow to great heights, indeed never reaching more than a mere five feet tall; yet her image, dominated by a smile that engulfed a face of a thousand wrinkles, would be known the world over, and her deeds would distinguish her as one of the 20th centurys greatest humanitarians.

It would not be long, only two years in fact, before Agness land was consumed by war. Her people would be ostracized and attacked, once for their ethnicity and then again for their religion. With the Ottoman Empire crumbling in the early 1910s, the Balkans, the land immediately west of modern-day Turkey, erupted into the type of violence that can only be fueled by ethnic and religious strife centuries in the making.

Positioned not far from what was once Constantinople, the city that for much of history had been the meeting ground between West and East, the Balkans of the early 20th century was composed of a great diversity of peoples. There were a number of different ethnic groups in the region, including Serbs, Albanians, Bulgarians, Greeks, and Turks. There were a number of religious divisions as well, divisions that at times fell along ethnic lines and at other times cut straight across them. During the early Middle Ages, the region had been dominated by Orthodox Christianity as well as a sizable Jewish population. Later, some in the region, including many Albanians, converted to Catholicism. There was yet another wave of conversions, primarily amongst the Albanian people, as Islam moved into the region and later became the official religion of the Ottoman Empire.

Despite all of this turmoil, Agness earliest days were happy and content. She was born to Nikola (father) and Drana (mother) Bojaxhiu. She had two older siblings: a sister, Aga, and a brother, Lazar. The date of her birth is disputed, but Agnes always claimed that her true birthday was August 27, the day she was baptized into the Catholic Church. They were a happy family and fairly well-off. Nikola worked a number of odd jobs, and the family attended their local Catholic church. However, as the ethnic and religious strife of the region came to Skopje, Nikola became increasingly involved in city politics.

With the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the power structure that had kept the numerous differences of the region in check disappeared as well. Violence erupted not only between the different ethnic groups of the region but also amongst the different religions. During Agness earliest days, the Serbs, a majority of whom practiced the Orthodox faith, were able to step in and fill the political vacuum in the region. The Albanians quickly found themselves living in a land that was not their own, both ethnically and religiously. As a result, an Albanian Independence movement grew quickly in numbers and support, and Nikola became increasingly involved in its activities. This movement resulted in the creation of an Albanian state in 1912. The drawing of such national borders is, of course, always the result of arbitrary and political decisions, and thus a great number of Albanians, including those living in Skopje, found themselves living in lands not contained within these borders. What is more, the Albanian nation that was created was dominated by those of the Muslim religion, leaving Catholic Albanians torn between their nation and their faith. Families such as the Bojaxhius thus found themselves in increasingly complicated and dangerous times. As Albanians, they had, overnight, become foreigners in the Serbian-dominated lands in which they lived, yet the nation that they might have called home did not reflect their religious convictions.