No Greater Love by Mother Teresa

First published: Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 1997, edited by Becky Benenate and Joseph Durepos

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Handbook for living; meditation and contemplation

Core issue(s): Catholics and Catholicism; church; clerical life; connectedness; love; poverty

Overview

Mother Teresa spent the bulk of her life ministering to the poorest of the poor on the streets of Calcutta. She begins No Greater Love by discussing the importance of prayer in her life. Prayer is her lifeblood. She is utterly dependent on God, and prayer connects her to God. She encourages all to pray, not only with words but also through silence. In silence, we can open our hearts to the presence of God, place ourselves humbly before him, and listen for him. In our prayer, we should give God all of ourselves, offering love and praise and seeking union with God. Only then can we go out and minister to the world.

Mother Teresa’s ministry was centered on love. She cared for the poor’s physical needs, but her main focus was on loving them. In her chapter on love, she emphasizes that this was the central focus of Jesus’ message. Jesus came to reveal God’s love to humankind and to command us to love one another. Mother Teresa’s life exemplified the meaning of love and of giving. She encouraged all people to give—not only tangible gifts such as money, food, and clothing but also the intangible gifts of ourselves, such as a smile or a caring ear. She encouraged people to give not just from their abundance but to the point of feeling the sacrifice of giving. It is also important, Mother Teresa maintains, to teach children how to give.

All are called to holiness. God created us to be holy. Mother Teresa tells us that we are called to turn our lives over to God through humility and prayer. It is only through stripping away the ego and offering our lives to God that we can love others the way God loves us. In learning to love as God loves, we learn to be holy.

We also serve God through our work, whether that work takes place in the world or within our families. God calls each to a different role, but whatever help we offer to another person, whatever service we perform for another, we also perform for Jesus. We must use our God-given talents to glorify God. By the same token, Mother Teresa says that the love we show to our family members reflects the love of God. It is within the family that children learn to love and to share that love with others. Our work within the family is some of the most important work we can do. Mother Teresa holds the family in the highest esteem. She laments that people today seem to be afraid of having children and that all too often today’s children are not loved. She also holds the vocation of parenting in high regard. She urges families to slow down and make time for one another. She tells families to pray together and, most important, love one another.

Mother Teresa served the poor, but in No Greater Love she emphasizes that it is not the lack of material goods that causes the most harm but rather the loss of human dignity. That sort of poverty is not limited to those who are materially poor. In fact, Mother Teresa states that the spiritually poor are much worse off. She can feed the hungry and provide a bed for the homeless, but healing anger and loneliness takes much longer. Loving someone is often the greatest service we can provide. There is much we can learn from the poor. Despite their extreme hunger and physical pain, the poor in Mother Teresa’s experience are not bitter, and they are willing to share what little that they have.

Part of providing love is offering forgiveness. In order to be able to forgive, we need to realize that we ourselves are in need of forgiveness. Mother Teresa stresses the importance of the sacrament of Confession. In the confessional, Christians turn their sinfulness over to God, begging for God’s forgiveness and through penance healing the divide that has come between us and others, and us and God. Mother Teresa relates her own habit of going to confession once a week. Like a young child going to her father to say she is sorry after doing something wrong, she goes to request forgiveness from her father in heaven, offering her failures to God and humbly receiving his mercy. Familiar with suffering, Mother Teresa encourages her readers to accept suffering as part of life and to offer it up to Jesus. In suffering, she advises readers to remember Christ’s suffering and his resurrection; there is always hope, even in suffering. The same holds true of death, which is merely a means of returning to God.

Mother Teresa also speaks about the meaning of vocation. Vocation is God’s call to us. Mother Teresa describes how she received her original call to religious life, and her second call to begin ministering to the poor. Vocation requires us to surrender our lives to God. To do so, we must have a loving trust in God.

No Greater Love concludes with an interview Mother Teresa gave to José Luis González-Balado, as well as a short biographical sketch.

Christian Themes

Jesus preached a message of love and radical poverty. He told those who wanted to follow him to love God, love their neighbor, and give all that they had to the poor. Mother Teresa dedicated her life to following those edicts, as do her fellow Missionaries of Charity. They minister to those whom the world has forgotten, seeing Jesus in each person for whom they care. In No Greater Love, Mother Teresa provided a window on her life and that ministry.

The book is essentially a handbook for living the Christian life. While all are not called to make a radical choice of poverty as Mother Teresa did, everyone is called to minister to those nearest at hand. We are called to love, beginning with those in our own families and then reaching out to the greater community. We are called to be generous and to give what we have to the poor. We do not need to make grand gestures; it is often in the smallest acts that love can be found.

Mother Teresa provides a wonderful example of how to live the Christian life. She lived Jesus’ message of love and, in this volume, invited others to do the same. She knew that the road to the Christian life is not easy; it often involves suffering and pain, loneliness and hunger that are both spiritual and physical. She invited her readers, however, to turn that pain over to Jesus, seeing Jesus in one another and loving as Jesus loved.

Sources for Further Study

Schaefer, Linda. Come and See: A Photojournalist’s Journey into the World of Mother Teresa. Sanford, Fla.: DC Press, 2003. Schaefer volunteered with Mother Teresa and ultimately received permission to photograph the experience. This book illustrates that amid pain and suffering there was also much joy to be experienced in this life of service.

Teresa, Mother, with José Luis González-Balado. Mother Teresa: In My Own Words. New York: Gramercy Books, 1996. González-Balado, a Spanish journalist and editor, knew Mother Teresa from 1969 until her death. This is a collection of her stories and prayers that illustrates her spirituality and presents her advice for following in the footsteps of Jesus.

Teresa, Mother, and Anthony Stern. Everything Starts from Prayer: Mother Teresa’s Meditations on Spiritual Life for People. Ashland, Oreg.: White Cloud Press, 1998. Contains Mother Teresa’s insights on prayer, which are appropriate for members of all faiths seeking a deeper connection with God.