Peggy Noonan: A Year for the Books

Mother Teresa's secret, and other revelations from 2008.
December 26, 2008

Excerpt:
None of these books were more important in the end than a modest and unheralded book called "Mother Teresa's Secret Fire" by Joseph Langford, a priest of her Missionaries of Charity and her close friend of many years. You wouldn't think there's much new to say here, but there is. Everyone knows that as a young nun in Calcutta, Mother Teresa, then Sister Teresa, left her convent, with only five rupees in her pocket, in order to work with the poorest of the poor in the slums of the city. But what made her do this?

On Sept. 10, 1946, on a train to Darjeeling, on her way to a spiritual retreat, she had, as Father Langford puts it, "an overwhelming experience of God." This is known. But its nature? It was not "some dry command to 'work for the poor,'" he says, but something else, something more monumental. What? For many years, she didn't like to speak of what happened, or interpret it. So the deepest meaning of her message remained largely unknown. Says Father Langford "What was deepest in her . . . is still a mystery even to her most ardent admirers. But it was not her wish that this secret remain forever unknown."

In this book, based on her letters, writings and conversations, he tells of how she came to serve "the least, the last, and the lost," not as a female Albert Schweitzer but as "a mystic with sleeves rolled up." Father Langford tells the story of her encounter on the train, of what was said, of what she heard, and of the things he learned from her including, most centrally, this: You must find your own Calcutta. You don't have to go to India. Calcutta is all around you. the rest

Book: Amazon.com