Mother Teresa: An Example of Moral Courage - Essay Example

Mother Teresa: An Example of Moral Courage Since the fall of Enron Corporation, there has been a greatdeal of talk in leadership circles about the question of ethics in a business context. However, in order for ethics to enter the business world, it must first exist in the personal. This has not always been easy because, while it is possible to hold a clear idea of personal ethics and behavior, it is usually much more difficult to act on these beliefs, particularly when the rest of the world is either turned against you or apathetic to your concerns. Rushworth Kidder defines moral courage as “standing up for values” and “principled action.” “In the defining moments of our lives – whether as a student watching a videotape or a president facing a nation – values count for little without the willingness to put them into practice. Without moral courage, our brightest virtues rust from lack of use. With it, we build piece by piece a more ethical world” (Kidder 3). Moral courage does not need to be recognized in order to exist, but it is often in the most extreme cases that moral courage must be at its highest levels, such as when great wrongs are committed and one individual, regardless of hardship or lack of external support, continues to work in keeping with their own personal values. A shining example of such an individual is Mother Teresa, a woman who fearlessly and selflessly endured hardships and criticisms in order to help the poorest of the poor while others chose to do nothing despite the suffering in front of them. It is frequently reported that Mother Teresa was born on August 27, 1910 in Skopje, Macedonia, but this date is somewhat erroneous. According to Kathryn Spink (1997), Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on August 26, 1910 and was christened under that name on August 27. Since the day she was dedicated to God was much more important to her than her actual date of birth, she didn’t worry too much about correcting the date. Her parents were Nikolle and Drandafille Bojaxhiu. Her father worked as a contractor and her mother was a housewife and mother to Agnes and her two older siblings. “Mother Teresa’s family was a devoted Catholic family, they prayed every evening and went to church almost every day. It was her family’s generosity, care for the poor and the less fortunate that made a great impact on young Mother’s Teresa’s life. By age 12, she had made up her mind, she realized that her vocation was aiding the poor” (D’souza, 2008). She remained with her family while she finished her formal education, remaining dedicated through this entire time to her early aspirations to spend her life helping poor people despite the usual temptations of youth and social pressures placed on women to marry and have children. This took a great deal of moral courage to resist these strong external and internal pressures in order to remain true to her higher nature and inner conviction that someone needed to stand up to help those in need. In keeping with this conviction, Mother Teresa, still Agnes, left her secure family home to travel all the way to Dublin, Ireland, a country she had never seen before, in order to join, sight unseen, an order of nuns that maintained several missions in India. “She knew she had to be a missionary to spread the love of Christ” (Nobel Lectures, 1997). The year was 1928 when Sister Teresa arrived on the doorstep of the Sisters of Loretto and began her training of how to be a missionary. According to D’souza (2008), she took the name of ‘Teresa’ after St. Teresa of Lesiux, who was recognized as a patroness of missionaries. This would turn out to be a prophetic name. After a few months, she was sent to Darjeeling, India to complete her training, where she finally took her initial vows as a nun on May 24, 1931 (Nobel Lectures, 1997). For the next 17 years, her devotion to her dream of helping the poor was deflected to some degree as she worked at St. Mary’s high school in Calcutta, primarily as a geography teacher. She worked as both a teacher and served as a principal, but, while this helped to educate children to keep them from living in the streets, it was not the kind of assistance she had once dreamed of providing. Throughout her teaching career, Sister Teresa could not help seeing the abject suffering and poverty occurring just outside the convent gates which continued to haunt her throughout all of these 17 years. While she retained the moral courage to pursue her dreams of becoming a missionary to help the poor, she had not yet discovered the inner fortitude to insist upon serving in the way she felt would be most beneficial to the neediest of the population. Sister Teresa’s life was changed forever during a train ride through Darjeeling in 1946. Suffering from what was feared to be tuberculosis, Sister Teresa was heading out of town to get some rest when she received a ‘wake-up call’ to her childhood dream. “On a train ride en route to some rest in Darjeeling, she had heard what she would later call a ‘voice’ asking her to work with the poorest of the poor, and experienced a profound sense of God’s presence” (Martin, 2007). By 1948, she had obtained permission from her superiors to leave the convent school and, with no funding and no promises of assistance, struck out on her own to provide such care as she could to the immensely downtrodden. This again took a significant amount of moral courage as the poorest people in India are typically considered untouchables, meaning it was social suicide to speak with them, much less do anything to actively help them. Mother Teresa started her work by opening up an open-air school for the poor children, knowing that this would be their ticket to exit the streets and enter gainful employment. Other sisters followed her lead by teaching subjects in the streets and Mother Teresa’s efforts gained the church’s attention. She managed to gain financial support for her new sisterhood, which she named the Missionaries of Charity. This society was officially declared by the Holy See on October 7, 1950 with the objective being “to care for the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone” as she explained when she accepted the Nobel Prize in 1979 (cited in Sarker, 2007). It is in association with this society that she spent the rest of her life doing exactly what she’d dreamed of doing as a child. When Mother Teresa first began her missionary work in the streets of Calcutta, she brought the homeless and the helpless to her small home on Convent Road to feed and heal them, but the needs of the poor soon outgrew her meager shelter. To better care for her ‘patients’, Mother Teresa moved her efforts into an abandoned portion of the Calcutta temple to Kali, who is the Hindu goddess of death and destruction. Mother Teresa named this shelter for the poor the Kalighat Home for the Dying, or Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart). It was a place where the poor could go to die with dignity and care, where terminally ill, such as those suffering from leprosy, could go to find a safe place to rest as they waited for their disease to run its course and where orphans were provided with food, shelter, clothing and an education (D’souza, 2008). This move, to open up the abandoned temple to the poor, was met with a great deal of opposition from the local community who felt she was attempting to subvert people to her religion at the most desperate and final moment of their lives. According to Lee (1982), Hindus were known to throw stones at Mother Teresa and her nuns for working her English religion within the temple of the Hindu goddess, but Mother Teresa persisted in caring for any and all who needed help. It must be remembered that Mother Teresa was working in an environment of suffering that was largely the result of English occupation and subjugation following the devastation of World War II and the riots of only a few years earlier when Indians were cut down in the streets and left to bleed to death (Greene, 2004). Her kindness even in the face of this hostility paid off, though, when she inadvertently saved the dying son of a Hindu priest from the streets and provided him with care and compassion (Lee, 1982). After this, she was more easily accepted by the common people and was able to begin gathering greater support from the community. It is hard to imagine the kind of courage it must have taken for this small woman to face down these harsh accusers and simply continue with her mission to help those most in need. No longer facing such strong opposition, Mother Teresa and the sisters of the Missionaries of Charity continued to open up new buildings to help house and treat the poor. In everything they did, the sisters’ primary directive was to make these people feel as if they were loved and wanted. In an interview in 1974, she said, “I see God in every human being. When I wash the leper’s wounds, I feel I am nursing the lord himself. Is it not a beautiful experience?” (cited in Sarker, 2007). However, Mother Teresa was well aware that India wasn’t the only place on earth that had a population of downtrodden, poor, hungry and suffering. She wanted to expand her work beyond the boundaries of India itself and petitioned Pope Paul VI for support to expand to other areas of the world, a wish he granted in 1965 (D’souza, 2008). Her first center outside of India was placed in the South American country of Venezuela, but it was far from the last center to be established (Clucas, 1990). Other locations included Ethiopia, South Africa, Albania, Rome, Tanzania and the United States. According to the Nobel Lectures report (1997), the Society of Missionaries has establishments in Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, Europe and Australia. In addition to helping the poor who have suffered from illness and hard times, the order also assists those who have been victims of catastrophes or war refugees and work in more modernized countries to assist “shut-ins, alcoholics, homeless and AIDS sufferers.” In most cases, Mother Teresa herself has traveled to these establishments to offer encouragement, help and love for the many. In some cases, she has even been instrumental in bringing success to these centers where others might have failed. “In 1982, at the height of the siege in Beirut she convinced the parties to stop the war so she could rescue 37 sick children trapped inside” (D’souza, 2008). She continued to visit her centers even after she began suffering from a number of health concerns. The larger the missionaries grew, the more Mother Teresa’s reputation grew, particularly since she always remained focused upon bringing aid to the poor and suffering. “When she received the Nobel Prize she wore the same trademark, her $1 sari and convinced the committee to cancel a dinner in her honor, using the money instead to ‘feed 400 children for a year in India.’” (D’souza, 2008). Continuing to appear in various places in support of her work to help the poor, Mother Teresa began experiencing severe health problems, which were only exacerbated by her exhausting schedule and poor living conditions for most of her life. In 1985, only three years after facing warring factions in Beirut, Mother Teresa was treated for a heart attack in Rome during a visit to Pope John Paul II. By 1989, she was required to undergo implant surgery following another heart attack, but continued to travel to raise money for her centers. Heart failure again struck in 1991 following a case of pneumonia in Tijuana, Mexico and heart surgery is again required in 1996 following a bout with malaria (D’souza, 2008). Despite this, Mother Teresa’s successor isn’t selected until March of 1997 when it appears the venerated nun cannot continue. Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997 at the age of 87. For a people who consider it a given right that they should be permitted to retire after the age of 65, it is amazing to consider the level of activity Mother Teresa continued to perform even after her many heart troubles. That she remained so dedicated to her calling, even with her multiple health issues, speaks of tremendous moral courage as she continued to step in and do her best even when she realized her body was giving out on her. Even with all the difficulties she faced in accomplishing all of her life’s achievements, Mother Teresa’s moral courage went deeper than anyone at the time suspected. Following her death, a collection of Mother Teresa’s private letters was published that revealed she had lost her connection to God shortly after beginning her missionary work. Although she firmly believed it had been God’s voice that had spoken to her on the train in 1946, it wasn’t long after moving away from the convent that she realized she could no longer feel that presence of God. “In 1957, she wrote to the archbishop of Calcutta about her struggles, saying, ‘I find no words to express the depths of the darkness.’” (Martin, 2007). This spiritual dryness persisted through to the end of her life. Mother Teresa experienced more than 50 years of suffering and deprivation, struggle and exhausting effort for a God she could no longer feel yet with complete devotion and dedication to her belief that he still existed. The message many have taken from Mother Teresa’s example is that “You can show others great love even if you feel empty. You can keep going when everything inside you says give up. You can do the right and moral thing when your feelings, cravings, and orientations are yelling against you. With all the fame, honor, and glory lavished upon Mother Teresa by the world, her inner dryness kept her humble” (Simms, 2008). Above all else, this dedication to a belief without any suggestion of support, encouragement or assurance of this belief speaks of a moral courage that far surpasses much of what most are able to summon. Mother Teresa struggled throughout her entire life against those who would oppose her or simply turn away. She forced people to see the pain and suffering in their own streets and provided them with leadership about how to address these needs. To do this, she left everything she knew behind not once, but twice, and went from being a simple nun to a world traveler and spokesperson with thousands looking to her for advice and guidance. She faced death, disease, starvation and persecution in her efforts to help others, but never failed to keep a kind face and a loving heart even when she alone was interested in bringing aid to the poor. In everything she did, she dedicated herself to the service of a God she could no longer feel yet remained dedicated to her beliefs and faithful to her work. In every sense of the word, Mother Teresa is an outstanding example of moral courage. Works Cited Clucas, Joan Graff. Mother Teresa. Harrap, 1990. D’souza, Poornima. “A Tribute to Mother Teresa.” (2008). October 9, 2008 Greene, Meg. Mother Teresa: A Biography. New York: Greenwood Press, 2004. Kidder, Rushworth M. Moral Courage. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Lee & Kilbride. Mother Teresa. New York: Dillon Press, 1982. Martin, James. “A Saint’s Dark Night.” New York Times. (August 29, 2007). October 9, 2008 Sarker, Paul. “Wisdom from the Saint of the Gutters.” Biographies. Ottawa Innercity Ministries, 2007. October 9, 2008 Simms, Steve. “Mother Teresa’s Courage.” My Church. (September 15, 2005). October 9, 2008 Spink, Kathryn. Mother Teresa: A Complete Authorized Biography. San Francisco: Harper, 1997. Read More