Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa
18 x 24 inches • oil on wood panel • artist Steve Simon
Biography
About the Painting
Selected Quote
Overview
Known to the Iroquois simply as “The Great Peacemaker,” Deganawidah had a powerful influence on the world. His vision for the Great Law of Peace and League of Five Nations established the first democratic confederation with a constitution.Interaction with the Iroquois by our Founding Fathers would have a deeply consequential impact on our own confederation of states and our own constitution.
The Iroquois, who are a matrilineal nation, also interacted with many of the early suffragists. In the Iroquois women, suffragists found a real-life, motivational example of empowered, enfranchised women.
The Saint and the Rosary
Mother Teresa Biography
Saint Teresa of Calcutta was one of the most revered people of the 20th century. She was born in Skopje, Albania (now Macedonia) in 1910 as Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu and would become familiarly known the world over as Mother Teresa.
Mother Teresa Monument
Skopje, Macedonia
At the tender age of eighteen, she left home for Ireland to join the Sisters of Loreto. There she learned English in advance of going to Darjeeling, India to train and prepare for missionary work. As a sister, she took the name Teresa after Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. She served as a teacher for nearly twenty years at the Loreto convent school in Calcutta (now Kolkata), where she became headmistress in 1944.
By 1943 with World War II raging, Calcutta and the rest of Bengal Province reeled from famine. Then, in August 1946, Muslim-Hindu violence erupted in what was known as the Great Calcutta Killings. The depth of Teresa’s compassion was fired in the crucible of these experiences. The following month Teresa returned to Darjeeling for an annual retreat. It was on this trip she received “the call within the call” as she would later put it. “I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith.”
“I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith.”
She soon began missionary work with the poor of Calcutta and in 1950 received permission from the Vatican for a new order called the Missionaries of Charity. The new order would care for “the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the leprous, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared, thrown away of the society, people who have become a burden to the society, and are ashamed by everybody.”
From these humble beginnings, Mother Teresa would grow the Missionaries of Charity over the course of five decades into a worldwide congregation active in 120 countries with over 4,500 religious sisters and untold numbers of volunteers.
Fluent in five languages, her efforts knew few boundaries. She cared for earthquake survivors in Armenia, starving orphans in Ethiopia, and visited evacuees from the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Perhaps her most audacious venture occurred in Beirut, Lebanon where she rescued thirty-seven children from a war zone hospital by negotiating a temporary cease-fire between combating Israelis and Palestinians.
In 1979, Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize. Four years later she survived her first heart attack, marking the beginning of the cardiac problems that would plague her last years. In March of 1997, with her health continuing to grow weaker, Teresa stepped down from her leadership role with the Missionaries of Charity. She died six months later, on September 5. She was canonized on September 4, 2016.
There are currently over 5,000 Missionaries of Charity active in 139 countries. They manage soup kitchens, dispensaries, mobile clinics, and family counseling programs while caring for refugees, orphaned children, the elderly, the convalescent, and those with mental and physical ailments.
About the Painting
In the Roman Catholic tradition since the 16th century, praying the Rosary has served as a veneration of the Mother Mary. In her book, Come, Be My Light, Mother Teresa offered guidance to sisters in her religious order who would go into the slums to tend to those in need. “Cling to the Rosary as the creeper clings to the tree—for without Our Lady we cannot stand.”
Traditionally, three mysteries of the life and death of Jesus were reflected upon the Rosary: Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious. The composition graphically expresses each of these. Mother Teresa’s smile expresses the joy, her wrinkled skin and her squinting eyes, filtering the torrents of sad memories, project the sorrow, and the praying hands wrapped with the rosary defer the glory to another Source.
Pope John Paul II, who called Mother Teresa an “icon of the good Samaritan,” added a fourth set of mysteries to the praying of the Rosary, the Luminous Mysteries. In the portrait, the shadows of Mother Teresa’s face are painted in warm tones to suggest the inner fire that burns in the saint’s heart—the inextinguishable luminous.
Mother Teresa Quote
“Give of your hands to serve and your hearts to love.”
