What Mother Teresa actually said about home
You may recognize these oft-quoted words from St. Teresa of Kolkata: “What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.”
Beautiful, right? Except — does that really sound like the Mother Teresa we know? The one we saw in the streets and slums of Kolkata, bending down to those covered in filth, lifting up the dying from the gutters?
No. It doesn’t. Because she never said it.
These famous words from Mother Teresa are a twist of what she actually said, in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1979:
“And so, my prayer for you is that truth will bring prayer in our homes, and the fruit of prayer will be that we believe that in the poor, it is Christ. And if we really believe, we will begin to love. And if we love, naturally, we will try to do something. First in our own home, our next door neighbor, in the country we live, in the whole world.”
The movement of her message is essential. We don’t go home, yank the curtains closed, and shut ourselves safely inside with our families. We don’t go back to our parishes, lock the doors and concern ourselves only with the people inside.
We are called to start first in our own homes, certainly. But then, following in the footsteps of our Lord, who went out to the people — over and over, every day of his life, ministering to messy humans in all their sin and suffering — we are called to go out to our neighbors, to strangers, even to our enemies.
We are called, by the power and grace of our baptism, to love and serve a broken, sinful world.
I hope I don’t scandalize your faith by revealing that the saints did not say all the words we often attribute to them. (It always helps to Google before you quote Augustine or Aquinas or anyone!)
But what we do know for certain is what Jesus Christ said to us. Thank God for the abundance and richness of the Gospels. Because when it comes to the relationship between faith and family, home and world, Jesus offers us challenging words.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies” (Mt 5:43-44).
“If any one comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26).
“And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, and sister, and mother'” (Mt 12:49-50).
God loves families, of course. This most intimate and important community of human life is where we begin our days on earth and where we first learn how to love.
Yet the formation we receive at home is not meant to stay at home. It is meant to prepare us to go out into the world, a world that desperately needs our truth and service but will also reject our Christian witness. So we must start with home and those closest to us, in our efforts to be peacemakers. But then we must go out — as St. Teresa said (truly said), from our home to our neighbors, then to our country, and ultimately to the whole world.
Right now, we can see ever more clearly the deep and desperate need that our world has for the love of Christ. May we not keep it locked up at home, but go out to share what we have been given.
This column was written by Laura Kelly Fanucci, an author, speaker, and founder of Mothering Spirit, an online gathering place on parenting and spirituality.
