The everlasting icon of the Good Samaritan

Precisely on August 26, 101 years ago in Skopje (modern Albania), a luminous messenger of God’s love for the world was born. Diminutive in stature but giant in spirit, Mother Teresa was an extraordinary witness of that amazing “light (that) shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (Jn 1, 5).

Thanks to her contemplative look at the Crucified Lord, as is preeminently found in the poorest of the poor, she recognised Jesus’ thirsting love for humanity. For her, “God still loves the world and He sends you and me to be His love and His compassion to the poor.”

Through our simple loving gestures, Christ still “quench(es) His thirst for love and for souls”. She knew thoroughly well that the deep-seated malaise of current culture is the terrible loneliness many of us are living in.

“Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat”.

Moreover, people who are well-off also feel unloved. “Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own”.

In countering this leading human misery, she advocated simple and transforming loving acts. “Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing”. Such actions have to start from our families. “Love begins by taking care of the closest ones – the ones at home”. “Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do... but how much love we put in that action”.

Her dream for our world was that of becoming a home for every human being. For Mother Teresa each person under the sun can become an angel of peace. Her encouragement sounds so actual and realistic! “Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier”. Since “peace begins with a smile” and is part and parcel of those “good works (that) are links that form a chain of love” it is essential that we “do not wait for leaders; (but) do it alone, person to person”.

One of the clearest signs of this spiritual and political long-lasting peace was her staunch and passionate defence of human life, particularly of the sacred rights of unborn children. “I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murdered by the mother herself.”

Abortion is the arch-enemy of peace since it horribly promotes the annihilating ethos of destroying innocent unborn lives. “And if we can accept that a mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?”

“By abortion the Mother does not learn to love but kills her own child to solve her problems. And, by abortion, that father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world.

“The father is likely to put other women to the same trouble. So abortion leads to more abortion”.

We too are called to be living icons of the Good Samaritan, as Mother Teresa was, but with a crucial difference. Mother Teresa is in heaven while we are still living in this world.

Motivated by her example let us remember that in each person we meet, there “is Jesus in disguise”.