"Yeah, I remember vividly when I was a kid in Little League, and the coach loved Roberto Clemente." "And I remember watching Clemente when I was, like, 8 or 9 years old, running the bases." "And he showed us a film of Clemente going from first around to third, just in this burst, this effortless burst of energy." "Boom!" "Look at that." "And he said, "Now watch how he runs." "That's how I want you to run."" "And my eighth grade basketball coach showed us this photograph of John Havlicek with the perfectly straight back and the perfect form and the elbow just right." "And he said, "See that?" "That's a jump shot." "That's what I want you to do."" "And so, in both cases " "I mean, I never ran the bases like Roberto Clemente." "I never shot a jump shot like Havlicek." "But there they were as these great inspirations." "So the Church holds up -- as you likely see behind me -- an image of the saint." "There it is." "Now, maybe you won't get there in this life, but it's a good model." "Go for it." "Who is a saint?" "A saint is a friend of God." "A saint is someone of heroic virtue." "A saint is someone who is in Heaven." "All three are true and all three are finally saying the same thing." "May I suggest a saint is someone who has allowed Christ to live his life in Him?" "St. Paul said, "It's no longer I who live, it's Christ who lives in me."" "If we look in the fifth chapter of Luke's Gospel, we find a peculiar story." "Jesus has been preaching to the crowds, and He spies two boats by the shore of the sea." "He gets into the one belonging to Simon Peter, and He says," ""Put out into the deep and lower your nets for a catch."" "Peter does so, and he brings in the miraculous draft of fishes." "He's so overwhelmed, he gets down on his knees and says," ""Lord, leave me, I'm a sinful man."" "Jesus said, "Do not be afraid, I will make you a fisher of men."" "If we unpack that little story," "I think we discover many of the dynamics of what it means to be a saint." "For Galilean fishermen of that time, his boat was everything." "It was his livelihood, his means of supporting his family, his connection to the wider world." "Well, Jesus, without asking permission, just gets into Peter's boat and begins giving orders." "This represents the invasion of grace." "The in-breaking of God's love." "Notice, grace doesn't compromise or undermine what it invades, rather it enhances it." "I presume Peter was a successful enough fisherman, but once he allows Jesus to get into his boat and begin ordering him, now he brings in a catch the likes of which he couldn't have imagined." "So it goes in the order of grace, if we're willing to cooperate with it, we experience life, and life to the full." "Might I suggest a saint is someone who has allowed Jesus to get into his boat?" "I'd like to explore this dynamic by looking at the lives of four relatively contemporary women saints." "I want to place special emphasis on the manner in which Jesus, uninvited, graciously invaded their lives and, with their cooperation, transfigured them from the inside out." "It's crucially important that we see these women in action, so that we can apprentice to them," "learn from them, and finally, fall in love with them." "The spiritual writer Léon Bloy once commented," ""There's only one real sadness in life... not to be a saint."" "Katharine Drexel was born in Philadelphia on November 26, 1858, the same year as the apparitions at Lourdes." "Her father was Francis Anthony Drexel, an internationally known banker and one of the richest men in America." "Katharine's childhood was idyllic." "Along with her siblings, she was given a first-class education in languages, literature, philosophy, music, and painting." "She lived in a sumptuous mansion in Philadelphia, and she summered with her family at a lovely country estate outside the city." "Her father and stepmother -- her mother had died just after her birth -- were both devout Catholics." "They had a chapel in their home, and their father retired to it for prayer every day after work." "Also, three afternoons a week, her parents would throw open their home to the poor and those in need." "The Drexels drilled into their children the conviction that their wealth had been entrusted to them and was destined, therefore, to be used for the common good." "When she was 14, Katharine met a man who would exert a decisive influence on her life," "Father James O'Connor." "They would have met here at the Drexel summer home." "You can see it right behind me." "It's now part of a busy and sprawling hospital complex in Philadelphia." "Katharine was already exhibiting signs of great spiritual seriousness, and under O'Connor's direction, she actually laid out a program for growth in holiness." "Pretty heady stuff for a teenage girl." "In 1878, when she was 20, her formal education ended, and in January of 1879, she was presented to Philadelphia high society." "Now, you would think for someone of that time and of her social class, that would have been a very important event." "Katharine Drexel, frankly, was rather bored and nonplused by it all." "Soon afterward, and within a few months of each other," "Katharine's beloved father and stepmother died, and she found herself inheriting a fortune of money." "She and each of her sisters received four million dollars from their father's estate." "Probably closer to 400 million dollars in our terms." "But Katharine was unsettled." "She didn't know quite what to do with this money or what to do with her life." "At this point, two other extraordinary men came to see her." "One was Bishop Martin Marty, the other was Father Joseph Stephan." "They were both involved in the Catholic Indian Mission." "The churches outreach to Native Americans." "They described their work so eloquently that Katharine was inspired to give a large part of her fortune to this work." "She even ventured west with them, to see the fruit of her donation." "The first connections with the work of missionaries to the Native Americans coincided with a period of great inner turmoil." "Following the deaths of her parents," "Katharine's health took a turn for the worse, and she was plunged into a period of anxiety and indecision." "She was struggling to find her purpose in life." "She did what a number of wealthy Americans of the time did in such circumstances:" "she went to Europe to "take the baths,"" "to go to a series of resorts and spas." "On this trip, Katharine had another life-changing encounter." "At the end of her European sojourn," "Katharine had an audience with Pope Leo Xlll." "Still mourning the death of her parents, still emotionally distraught, still trying to find her path in life, she knelt before the Pope." "She spoke to him of her passion for the Indian Mission, and she said, "Holy Father, you must found an order of priests or nuns to send, to teach and to catechize, and to love these good people."" "The Pope fixed her with his gaze, and he said," ""You should be that missionary."" "The Pope's words cut Katharine to the soul." "She said she felt sick all over, she couldn't get out of the Vatican fast enough, and when she was outside, she sobbed and sobbed and sobbed." "The Pope had obviously struck a nerve." "It also served to focus her desire." "She began to wonder whether God was calling her to be a nun." "Perhaps even the founder of a religious order, one dedicated to the poorest and most forgotten of Americans." "When she informed her spiritual director, he was, at first, reticent." "How could this coddled and well-educated aristocrat, accustomed to the finest things, accept the severe discipline of a religious life?" "But in time, he relented, and Katharine entered the novitiate of the Sisters of Mercy of Pittsburgh in May of 1889." "Two years later, she made her final profession as the first member of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People." "From the beginning, Katharine managed to attract a large number of young women eager to share her life." "They gathered at the motherhouse outside of Philadelphia, and spent three years in formation and training before they set out for missionary work." "One of the first outposts was among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico." "Next, they set up a school for African American children along the James River in Virginia." "Perhaps Mother Drexel's most important foundation followed," "Xavier University in New Orleans as a center for advanced studies for black young people." "A place and purpose unheard of at the time." "Where did the money come from for all of these works and undertakings?" "Well, it came from Katharine's trust fund, that money given to her by her father." "Katharine gave and gave and gave until there was no more to give." "Utterly spending herself in service of her mission." "Was this justice?" "It was so much more than that." "Was it extraordinary justice?" "So much more than that." "It was justice elevated, transfigured, rendered luminescent by grace." "Christ had so seized Katharine Drexel's life that she now became a living icon of His presence." "It's in that that her sanctity consists." "For many years, Katharine directed the work of her community." "She traveled widely all over the country, visiting her sisters at a time when travel was quite difficult." "On one of her trips in 1935, she suffered a heart attack." "The doctors told her unless she curtailed her schedule, she wouldn't survive." "So Katharine Drexel entered into what she took to be the most spiritually productive period of her life." "The last 20 years, when here in this place, in this motherhouse, every day, before the Blessed Sacrament, she prayed for the success of her order." "Mother Drexel died on March the third, 1955." "But her work goes on, her spirit lives on in her community and their works all over the world." "This great spirit of elevated, transfigured justice." "I want to recover the sense of spiritual heroism, that we should want to be saints." "We should want to be a saint and don't settle for second best, for a second or third rate spiritual life." "No, I want to be a great saint." "That's what you've been designed for." "And, in fact, all of us, Yves Lenoire said this." "He said, "All of us, when we get to Heaven, if we get there, will all be saint so-and-so."" "'Cause only saints live in Heaven." "You know, so, now it might be through a long process of purification in this life and the life to come, but nevertheless, when you get to Heaven, by God, you're a saint." "And so, that's what we're all aspiring to be are saints." "See, that's why I tell people that's a cool thing and a good thing to want and to want it with all your heart." "You know, they say, "l want to be the most famous person in the world."" "Well, that's stupid." ""l want to be the most..." "the wealthiest person in the world."" "That's a waste of time." "But "l want to be a saint with all my heart," off you go." "That's a great thing to desire." "I'm in front of this grand and glorious basilica dedicated to a very simple woman, also one of the strangest and most extraordinary of the saints of the church, Thérèse of Lisieux." "She was a cloistered Carmelite nun who died at the age of 24." "At the time of her death, she was known only to her family and to the sisters in the convent." "And yet, within a few years of her death, she had a worldwide reputation." "She was declared a saint and eventually a doctor of the Church." "When a reliquary containing her bones was brought to the U.S. in the 1990s, millions of people responded." "They say when that same reliquary was brought to Ireland, almost the entire country moved to see it." "How do we begin to explain this?" "It has a lot to do with her extraordinary spiritual autobiography called The Story of a Soul." "I'll confess that when I first read The Story of a Soul," "I didn't like it particularly." "Like many others, I found it a bit overly sentimental, emotionally overwrought, and as a post-Freudian, I was only too willing to see evidence of neuroses and repressions." "But then I noticed something." "The number of truly great intellectuals who loved Thérèse." "Think of Dorothy Day, Edith Stein, Thomas Merton, John Paul ll," "Hans Urs von Balthasar just to name a few." "And then when I was a doctoral student in Paris, my thesis director, Michel Corbin, a very brilliant man, was explaining one day to me how the French don't refer to Thérèse as the "Little Flower" as we do," "but rather as "la petite Thérèse," "the little Thérèse."" "As opposed to "la grande Thérèse,"" "the great T eresa who is T eresa of Avila." "But then he added this, after many years of reading Thérèse of Lisieux, he said, "l realize elle est vraiment la grande Thérèse."" ""She is truly the great Teresa."" "I realized I had to take a second look." "She was born on January 2, 1 873, the youngest child of Louis Martin and his wife Zélie, two extremely pious members of the French middle class." "By her own admission, Thérèse's childhood was blissful." "The youngest child, she was doted on by everyone, especially her father." "He was her petit roi, "little king,"" "and she was his petite reine, "little queen."" "Very early in life, she had the intuition that she would follow her sister Pauline into the Carmelite convent and become a religious." "She never wavered from this resolution." "The bliss of her childhood came to an abrupt end with the death of her mother in 1877, when Thérèse was only four." "Afterwards, she became withdrawn, moody, as she herself said," ""sensitive to an excessive degree."" "Her time at school in Lisieux was not pleasant as she was picked on by her classmates." "For the first time in her life, she felt herself, as she put it," ""weighed and found wanting."" "The full effect of her mother's death on Thérèse would appear when Pauline, her older sister and substitute mother, decided to enter the convent." "Thérèse experienced a strange malady, with both physical and psychological symptoms, some of them quite frightening." "She would cry violently, suffer from severe headaches, fall into fits of shivering." "Here is Thérèse's own description of this period," ""l was absolutely terrified of everything."" "What saved her finally was a manifestation of grace." "On May 13, 1883, Thérèse found herself here in bed." "She was utterly debilitated physically, psychologically, unable to help herself." "And then she noticed the statue of the Blessed Mother." "It had been in her room before, but it was though she was noticing it for the first time." "She said she was struck by the ravishing beauty of the statue, and especially by the Virgin Mary's smile." "When she noticed the smile of the Blessed Mother, all of her physical and psychological symptoms left her." "She was healed." "Now, how do we explain this extraordinary incident?" "We could look at it many ways, I suppose." "But Thérèse saw it as a manifestation of God's grace," "God's unmerited love." "When she came of age, she became one of the great doctors of grace in our tradition." "Yes, we cooperate with God's love, but finally the beginning and the end of the spiritual life is grace." "The next great step in Thérèse's spiritual journey was, again, a private small matter, nothing to which a conventional biographer would draw attention." "It took place on Christmas Day." "There was a custom in the Martin family that very early on Christmas morning, just after Midnight Mass, the children would come home and they would draw from their shoes, that were arranged right here in front of the fireplace," "little gifts that their parents had placed in them." "Well, Thérèse loved this ritual and especially her father's participation in it." "But that Christmas morning of 1886, Thérèse went up this staircase and when she was presumably out of earshot, she heard her father say," ""Well, fortunately, this is the last time."" "Now that comment normally would have broken her heart, and she would have dissolved in tears, but something different happened." "Significantly on this birthday of Jesus, she realized that Jesus had invaded her heart." "So instead, she suppressed those feelings, she came down those stairs and with unfeigned enthusiasm, she participated in this family ritual." "What do we see here in this very simple scene?" "We see the invasion of grace." "Thérèse realized now that her life had to be completely determined by the love of Jesus." "In the wake of this event, the desire to become a Carmelite, which had been in her since childhood, now became a burning preoccupation." "After she convinced her father that this was right for her, she met, with extraordinary courage, a number of bishops and ecclesiastics who opposed her and told her she was too young." "But she resolved to bring the case to the highest possible court." "She joined a group of pilgrims going to Rome, hoping to present her plea personally to Pope Leo Xlll himself." "On November 20th, 1887, Thérèse had her audience." "Though she had been told to say nothing to the Pope, she blurted out, "Holy Father, in honor of your jubilee, permit me to enter Carmel at the age of 15."" "The Pope smiled and told her to do what her superiors ordered." "But she persisted," ""Oh, Holy Father, if you say yes, everyone will agree."" "The Pope responded, "Go, go." "You will enter if God wills it."" "At that point, still begging and weeping, she was carried off bodily by two papal guards." "A month later, the Bishop of Bayeux relented, and she was given permission to enter Carmel." "For the next nine years, until her death at 24," "Thérèse never left the confines of the Lisieux Carmel," "living the simple life of a Carmelite religious." "But in the course of those years, she began to cultivate a spiritual path that she came to call "The Little Way."" "It was not the path of her great Carmelite forebears," "Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, not the way of spiritual athletes, but a way that any simple believer could follow." "It had a great deal to do with spiritual childhood, becoming a little child in the presence of God the Father:" "dependent, hopeful, waiting to receive gifts." "She wrote this in The Story of a Soul," ""Jesus deigned to show me the road that leads to this Divine Furnace and this road is the surrender of the little child who sleeps without fear in its Father's arms."" "It involved, too, a willingness to do simple and ordinary things out of great love:" "little acts of kindness, small sacrifices accepted graciously." "One of the most memorable passages in The Story of a Soul is Thérèse's delicious description of her very patient dealings with a cranky old nun to whom she'd been assigned." "At the heart of The Little Way is the prudence to know in any given situation what is the demand of love." "Willing the good of the other as other." "Toward the end of her life," "Thérèse experienced the intense desire to do all the things the great figures in the history of the Church had done." "She said, "l wanted to be priest, martyr, missionary, evangelist, and doctor."" "Then she thought, "How could I possibly be any of these things in my little monastery here in Carmel?"" "Then she read Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, and she was struck by that magnificent passage where Paul talks about the more excellent way, the way of love." "Thérèse realized in a flash that love was the form of all the virtues," "Iove was what made the lives of all the saints possible," "Iove was what undergirded the work of priest, missionary, evangelist, doctor." "And so she said, "Jesus, my love, I found my vocation." "I will be love in the heart of the Church."" "That is The Little Way." "I mentioned at the outset how I, like many others, was initially put off by the overly emotional, sentimental style of the "Little Flower."" "But even the most skeptical reader is usually won over by the account of her terrible struggle, at the end of her life, with unbelief." "What began to plague Thérèse were doubts about the very existence of Heaven." "Like Hamlet, she began to wonder whether anything followed "this sleep of death."" "And this was no passing bout of intellectual scrupulosity." "It would last up until the very end of her life." "She wrote, "This trial was to last not a matter of days or weeks, it would not be extinguished until the hour set by God Himself and that hour has not yet come."" "She wrote that just a few weeks before she died." "What's extraordinary is how she interpreted this struggle, as a participation in the pain of so many of her contemporaries who no longer believed in God." "She wrote, "During the joyful days of Easter," "Jesus made me really feel there are souls who have no faith." "He allowed my soul to be invaded by the thickest darkness."" "Thérèse died of tuberculosis on September 30, 1897." "As I mentioned at the outset, at the time of her death, she was known only by a handful of people." "Yet, within a few years of her passing, through the influence of The Story of a Soul," "The Little Way began to beguile people all over the world." "I spoke of Katharine Drexel's sanctity as a sort of elevated justice." "We might characterize Thérèse's holiness as transfigured prudence." "Prudence as a kind of moral know-how." "The little way is prudence elevated, and transfigured by the radicality of Christ's love." "She had a great poetic imagination." "That's what grabs people, too." "She always protested that she was not one of these spiritual athletes." "She knew about John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila and these great figures." "She admired them." "And she would say," ""But I'm not like that." "I'm not a spiritual athlete." "I'm not one of these great trees that grow up to God." "I'm just a little flower."" "And that's where the nickname comes from." ""I'm a little flower on the floor of the forest." "No one's going to notice me."" "But the sun can shine equally on all of them." "The sun hits the high trees and the sun comes down to the forest floor." "And so, it's a great metaphor for the universality of grace, that we're all susceptible to the influence of grace, as the sun shines on the good and the bad alike." "It shines on the great and the small alike." "So that was a great bit of spiritual intuition she had, I think, that appeals to people." "What about that analogy of, like, you said she lifted her hands up to God?" "Oh, yeah." "That's a splendid one, I think." "It's beautiful, and there's kind of a wry smile behind it, because she again acknowledges the spiritual athletes, you know, the really serious people." "They're climbing their way up to God, and she admired them." "But she also, with that little wry smile, would say, "Well, I'm just this little child." "I can't climb the mountain, but I can raise my arms up like this, and, of course, of course, He's going to want to pick me up."" "And then she sort of winks at the spiritual athletes and says," ""And actually, I get higher than you, 'cause He lifts me right up."" "It's that kind of perception that I think people find very moving and very attractive." "Edith Stein was born October 12, 1891, in Breslau, a town situated now within the borders of Poland but then part of the German empire." "She was the seventh and youngest child of pious Jewish parents." "Like Thérèse of Lisieux, she was doted on by her parents" "like a, as she put it," ""cross between a fairytale princess and a porcelain doll."" "One of her earliest memories is of herself standing in front of a big white door, drumming on it with clenched fists because she wanted to get to the other side." "This determination would stay with her all her life." "Her father died suddenly when Edith was still quite young, and she bonded strongly with her mother." "Frau Stein introduced her daughter to the disciplines and feasts of the Jewish religion, as well as the world of the Bible, and her elder brother Paul began to read to her regularly from the great works of German literature." "But as the years passed, her passion for the Word grew even as her faith faded." "By the time Edith was a teenager, she no longer believed in God." "As a university student, she became fascinated by the work of Edmund Husserl, and his new and famously complex school of phenomenology." "She longed to study with the master himself, and so came, in 1913, to Gottingen, where Husserl taught." "In short order, she was introduced to Husserl and to the circle of brilliant students who had formed around him." "She labored away at her doctoral studies, pursuing the typically phenomenological theme of empathy or fellow feeling." "Like many doctoral students before and since," "Edith experienced tremendous strain while undertaking this project." "She wrote, "This excruciating struggle to attain clarity was waged unceasingly inside me, depriving me of rest day and night." "Little by little, I worked myself into a state of veritable despair."" "She survived this period of struggle and earned her doctorate in 1915, barely two years after arriving in Gottingen." "Soon after she finished her work, Husserl received an appointment to the University of Freiburg in Breisgau, and the master asked Edith to go with him as his assistant." "She returned to her work with Husserl, but she frankly found it less than satisfying because the master treated her as more or less a glorified secretary." "In fact, many of Edith's friends were scandalized that someone of her great intellect was forced to perform such simple tasks." "In 191 7, Edith paid a courtesy call to the widow of Adolf Reinach, an old acquaintance from her Gottingen days who had been killed in the war." "She expected to find the young widow devastated." "But instead, she found her sad but fundamentally at peace." "The serenity, she learned, was the product of the woman's Christian faith." "She wrote, "lt was my first encounter with the cross and the divine power that it bestows upon those who carry it."" "Edith was finding a new and vibrant center." "Jesus was getting into her boat." "Another turning point occurred when Edith was in Frankfurt, making her way through the old city." "She and a friend came upon the cathedral and they entered as tourists, intent upon admiring the architecture." "But Edith saw a woman there, fresh from her rounds of shopping, kneeling in silent and intense prayer." "She had certainly seen people praying in the synagogue before, but never anything like this." "She said, "l could never forget that."" "Edith's conversion was not like Paul's, sudden and dramatic." "It was more like Newman's or Augustine's:" "gradual, interior, accompanied by much intellectual wrestling." "One night, she was staying with friends and she wanted to find a book to pass the time." "She took off the shelf a copy of Teresa of Avila's autobiography." "She stayed up all night reading it." "The next morning, she put the book down, and she said simply, "That is the truth."" "What especially impressed her about the book is impossible to say." "When she was pressed on the matter, she simply said," ""Secretum meum mihi. "" ""That's my secret."" "I think it's fair to say that the reading of Teresa's autobiography was the galvanizing moment." "It was the occasion for all of the strands to come together." "After a few weeks of thinking and praying," "Edith approached her local pastor and asked to be baptized." "When he balked, due to her recent conversion, she said eagerly, "Prufen Sie mich!"" ""Test me!"" "She was received into the Church on January 1, 1922, in those days, the Feast of the Circumcision, the first shedding of Jesus' blood." "Edith wanted immediately to join the Carmelites, the order of her religious hero, but her director asked her to wait." "She became instead a professor at a teachers' training college run by the Dominican sisters." "Among the Dominicans, Edith began to live essentially a religious life." "Her desire for Carmel continued to burn, and in June of 1933," "Edith was accepted into the Carmel here in Cologne." "Though she was far older than the other postulants and novices, she took very readily to Carmelite life, as though she was born for it." "In November of 1938," "Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, took place, and suddenly, Jews all over Germany were in acute danger." "Concerned for her safety," "Edith's superiors transferred her from the Carmel here in Cologne to the Carmel in Echt in Holland." "But in 1940, the Nazis overran Holland, and the danger that loomed over Edith here now threatened again." "Bravely, the Dutch bishops raised their voices in protest over the ill-treatment of Jews." "The Archbishop of Utrecht finally ordered that Nazi policy be attacked from every pulpit in the country." "The Nazis retaliated brutally, ordering a round-up of all Jews who had converted to Catholicism." "On Sunday, August 2, 1942, the Gestapo came for Edith and her sister, who had joined Edith in the convent." "Amidst the confusion, Edith calmly said," ""Come, Rosa, we're going for our people."" "The sisters were held briefly in a camp and then were packed onto what amounted to a cattle car for their trip to Auschwitz." "A former student of Edith's reported an encounter when the train was briefly stopped at a platform in Germany." "After exchanging pleasantries," "Edith told her to convey this message to the mother superior in Echt," ""We are going to the East,"" "a phrase both literal and spiritual in import." "There is still another report from a German soldier who was making his way to the Eastern front." "On August 7, while he was on the train platform in Breslau," "Edith's hometown, a train pulled up, and the door was pulled back to reveal people packed together like animals." "The stench coming from the car..." "unbearable." "Then a woman appeared in a Carmelite habit." "She commented on the terrible conditions, but then she said wistfully," ""This is my beloved hometown." "I will never see it again."" "Many years later, this former soldier saw a photograph of Edith Stein and identified her as the nun that he had met that day." "On August 9, 1942, Edith arrived here in Birkenau." "She was selected immediately for execution." "They brought her here to this gas chamber." "You can see the ruins of it just behind me." "And here she was murdered." "Subsequently, her body was burned and the ashes strewn to the wind." "The classical moral philosophers spoke of courage as the virtue that enabled one to do the good despite external threats." "What we see in a martyr such as Edith Stein is not ordinary courage, but courage elevated and transformed through love." "We see a willingness to give away, even one's life, out of love for Christ and His people." "Thomas Aquinas' sister asked him one time," ""What must I do to be a saint?"" "He said, "Will it!" And that's a good answer." "You see, part of our problem is that we accept a kind of spiritual mediocrity." ""Me, a saint?" "I mean, come on."" "Well, I mean, heck, there's so many different types of saints." "Great sinners who became saints, people that were a million miles from God and became saints." "Part of it is to..." "is to want it, is to move beyond a sort of spiritual mediocrity and say," ""No, I want to be a person of heroic virtue." "I want to follow Christ with all my heart."" "And so, desire it, and stop playing the game of a false humility." ""This is..." "Well, I could never do that."" "No, God can do whatever He wants." "God can make a saint from any of us, but we have to desire to cooperate with it." "Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, Serbia." "When she was 12," "Agnes felt the first stirrings of a religious vocation, though she had, to that point in her life, never as much as laid eyes on a nun." "Agnes applied at the age of 18 to the Loreto Sisters, the Irish branch of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which had a strong missionary presence in India." "During her postulancy, she took the name Sister Mary Teresa of the Child Jesus, after the recently canonized Little Flower." "After spending a brief period in Ireland, she set sail for India." "When she arrived in India, she was dazzled by its luxuriant natural beauty" "and shocked beyond words by its grinding poverty." "Though she had known poverty in Serbia, nothing prepared her for what she saw in India." "The conviction grew in her that service to such poor would involve a radical simplifying of her own life." "At first, Teresa was isolated from the worst of Calcutta's poverty." "She was teaching geography and English behind the high walls of a Loreto convent school." "But eventually, she began to teach in a grade school some miles away, and she came face to face, once again, with dreadful poverty." "For the next several years," "Teresa, now called "Mother" since she had taken final vows, worked at a furious pace: teaching, administrating, caring for the sick." "So arduous was her work that she experienced a kind of breakdown and was sent to Darjeeling, the restful place where she had been a novice, in order to recuperate." "On the dusty train to Darjeeling, she had the experience that would change her life." "She received the call of God to be a Missionary of Charity, the summons to serve the poorest of the poor, to follow Jesus with a reckless abandon." "She called this "the hidden treasure for me,"" "and she understood it as a summons." "To slake the thirst of Jesus for souls." "When she returned to Calcutta, she submitted herself to the spiritual direction of Father Celeste Van Exem, a Belgian Jesuit who would prove an extremely helpful and important figure in her life." "After a year of prayer and discernment," "Mother Teresa and Father Van Exem brought the idea of founding a new order to serve the poorest of the poor to the Archbishop of Calcutta, Ferdinand Périer." "A wise character, Périer tested the vocation of the little nun, throwing up all sorts of objections and roadblocks." "Despite his opposition, she persisted, and the Archbishop's admiration for her grew." "Périer eventually consulted experts in canon law and devised a way to release Mother Teresa from her vows to the Loreto Sisters and to found her own community." "In April of 1948, formal approval came from Rome, and Mother Teresa said simply, "Can I go to the slums now?"" "In the first weeks and months of her new life," "Mother Teresa experienced, understandably enough, bouts of discouragement and loneliness, and the accompanying desire to return to the relative comfort and ease of Loreto." "But she persevered." "She knew that if she was to serve the poorest of the poor, she had to live like them." "And then something that we've come to expect in the lives of the saints, when a work is of God, people are drawn to it." "And so many of Mother Teresa's former students came to join her here in the slums of Calcutta." "They became the first Missionaries of Charity." "She quickly formed them into a religious community, fashioning a rule which combined elements of the Jesuit and Franciscan spiritual traditions." "She put special emphasis on their identification with the poorest of the poor." "All that the first Missionaries of Charity were allowed to possess were a cotton sari, a pair of sandals, a crucifix, a rosary, a metal bucket for washing, and a very thin mattress that served as a bed." "Also, like the early Franciscans and Dominicans, they were compelled to beg for their food." "There was also a kind of poverty built into the rhythm of their day." "During the week, the sisters rose at 4:40 a.m., brushed their teeth with ash from the kitchen stove, and scrubbed their bodies with a small bar of soap that had been divided into six." "Between 5:15 and 6:45, they meditated, prayed, and attended Mass." "They ate a small breakfast and were then on the streets doing their work by 7:45." "They returned at noon for prayers and a small mid-day meal and then rested and did spiritual reading until they returned to their pastoral work in the slums." "At first, the work of Missionaries of Charity was restricted here to Calcutta, but beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, the order began to spread, first across India and then around the world." "There were establishments in Venezuela and Tanzania," "United States, Australia, England." "By the end of the 1990s, there were over 500 establishments on six continents." "Mother Teresa said," ""lf there are poor people on the moon, we shall go there, too!"" "In time, Mother became an internationally renowned figure, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979." "To the surprise of many outside the Church, she used her Nobel speech as an occasion to decry abortion as the greatest enemy of peace in contemporary society." "No account of Mother Teresa's life would be complete, however, without making reference to her terrible interior struggle, her unique participation in the suffering of Christ." "Though she experienced extraordinary closeness to Jesus most of her life, once the order got underway, she experienced just the opposite, an aching sense of the Lord's absence." "And this darkness lasted, with one brief respite, for the rest of her life." "Here's one particularly devastating account of what it felt like to endure this darkness." ""ln my soul, I feel just that terrible pain of loss of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing." "My work holds no joy, no attraction, no zeal."" "She came to understand her suffering as a sharing in the passion of Jesus," "His own feeling of abandonment by the Father." "Feeling the absence of God," "Mother Teresa entered even more fully into the suffering of those she longed to serve." "And this experience brought her, as we saw, remarkably close to her namesake Thérèse of Lisieux who, at the end of her life, faced a similar struggle believing in God and in the reality of heaven." "Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997, at the age of 87." "When her body was displayed for public viewing, it was, of course, clothed in the habit of the Missionaries of Charity, but it was also left shoeless, revealing her remarkably gnarled feet." "For many people, those misshapen feet spoke most eloquently of her hard years of service on behalf of the poorest of the poor." "The philosophers speak of temperance, the virtue by which we control our desires for food, drink, and pleasure, so that we might achieve the demands of justice." "What we see in Mother Teresa is elevated or transfigured temperance." "A disciplining of the desires which goes far beyond the requirements of justice, so as to serve the infinite demand of love." "Part of the glory of the saints is we have so many of them, and they're all different personalities, different backgrounds, different styles." "Part of the beauty of the Church is you have a saint like Thomas Aquinas, a towering intellectual, and a saint like Francis of Assisi, who wasn't much of an intellectual at all." "You've got a warrior saint like Joan of Arc, and then you've got saints of non-violence." "You have saints from all different backgrounds and temperaments and personalities, and part of it is to find the saint that's really suitable for you." "Something I tell people, though, too, is the opposite." "Find a saint that's like you, but also find a saint that's not like you." "Find a saint that's from a different background, has a very different personality, and see what you can learn from that saint." "But that's the glory of what we call the communion of saints, that we have all these different figures." "Thank God." "There isn't just one model of holiness." "There's a lot of ways to be holy." "And so, we can all find our place." "The holiness of God is like a white light:" "pure, simple, complete." "But when that lights shines, as it were, through the prism of individual human lives, it breaks into an infinite variety of colors." "The four women we've considered couldn't be more different from one another, and that is why each one allows a unique dimension of the Divine Holiness to appear." "God's grace shone through the individuality of Katharine Drexel, and it produced a miracle of transfigured justice." "It shone through the particularity of Edith Stein and gave us the clarity of her intellectual work and the beauty of her martyrdom." "It shone to the uniqueness of Thérèse of Lisieux and gave us The Little Way." "It shone through the unrepeatable identity of Mother Teresa and brought forth the Missionaries of Charity." "The Church revels in the variety of its saints because it needs such diversity in order to represent the infinite intensity of God's goodness."