Encountering Mother Teresa. Linda Schaefer

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      Archbishop John Donoghue was elated as he led Mother Teresa by the hand through packed crowds to Sacred Heart Church in downtown Atlanta.

      Everyone who was drawn to Mother Teresa, and inevitably transformed by her touch, has a story to tell.

      This book contains an extensive interview with Father James McCurry, currently serving as minister provincial of the Our Lady of the Angels Province of the Franciscan Friars Conventual. I met him on my flight from Rome the day after Mother Teresa’s beatification. Father McCurry told me that the foundation of his many talks to the Missionaries of Charity was devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary along with Mother Teresa. In addition, this book includes portions of my interview with Father Michael Van Der Peet, SCJ, to whom Mother Teresa confided the spiritual darkness she experienced — something most of those closest to her never knew. I also include an interview with Father Flavian Wilathgamuwa, a priest from Sri Lanka whom I met in a Los Angeles hospital not long before he died. Another priest, Monsignor John Esseff, had a long relationship with Mother Teresa. His position as a pontifical appointee to Lebanon led to his first meeting with Mother Teresa and his role as spiritual director to the contemplative branch of the Missionaries of Charity.

      This book also includes the stories of two significant women whose lives would become intimately tied with Mother Teresa and the work of the Missionaries of Charity. Dr. Anita Figueredo was one of the first female surgical oncologists in the United States. She was working in San Diego, California, when she first met Mother Teresa in the 1960s. I had the opportunity to interview her on tape in 2005. Huldah Buntain is a Protestant missionary who accompanied her husband to India in the early 1950s to begin their service to the poor. The couple met Mother Teresa in the early days of their work and partnered with the Missionaries of Charity in assisting those who needed medical attention. The stories of these two women, living in different parts of the world, are much like the thousands of others who were linked to Mother Teresa through charitable work. As they would attest, the touch of Mother Teresa’s hand was enough to transform lives and alter their direction forever.

      The touch of Mother Teresa’s hand was enough to transform lives and alter their direction forever.

      I also had the rare opportunity to interview Sister Tarcisia, the eighteenth sister to join Mother Teresa’s order. These stories, along with several other brief interviews, make up the content of this book. Each of our unique stories is woven together with a single thread: We were all drawn into the orbit of “Mother.”

      • • •

      I have been on a personal quest for a mother figure since I was a child. Illness was very much a part of my life from an early age, as my mother suffered breast cancer in her mid-forties and then severe aftereffects. I was thirteen years old when my father came back from the hospital in Rome, Italy, and gave my siblings and me the news of our mother’s surgery. The devastation unfolded day by day, year by year, until newer illnesses led to blindness, a stroke, a coma, and her eventual passing at seventy-eight. My father also suffered two severe heart attacks and chronic congestive heart failure. I became largely responsible for raising myself. Fear of abandonment and anxiety over the ever-present threats of illness were a constant companion and shadow.

      I found my greatest relief from the darkness of life through the lens of my camera. When I first discovered photography in the darkroom at the University of Michigan in 1975, the realization came instantly: This would become my medium and the art form through which I could best express myself. Following my intuition, I walked into the Star Bar, a seedy barfly gathering spot, and I took photographs of people who had chosen to live on the margins of society. It was in these faces that I found an authenticity that was hard to label — people whose lives had lost any sense of direction or those who had long been forgotten by life itself.

      After graduating from Michigan in 1978, I moved to New York City, where I toured largely unknown corners of the city, seeking refuge from my feelings of isolation. When I photographed the homeless dwellers on the Bowery, I discovered the compassionate side of God. He surely loved these men as much as he loved those who traveled to work in fancy cars and lived in luxurious high-rises. I found the Holy Spirit alive in the most broken areas of the city. I befriended street gangs, homeless people, and an eccentric poet who lived in Coney Island with his monkey from the Amazon. This made sense to me. God was present in the poor. This is where the compassionate Christ resonates for me. I believe it is where we all can find him — in the depths of our personal spiritual poverty and in serving those most in need.

      Author’s family sharing some last moments with her Norwegian grandparents aboard the Norwegian America Cruise Ocean Liner MS Oslofjord in the 1960s. From left to right: Karen, Liv, Magnhild and Gabriel Gausland, John, Linda, and Frank Schaefer.

      Author with her siblings, Karen and John, in front of their home in São Paulo, Brazil, where their father worked as an executive for General Motors.

      Author with her mother in the early 1970s.

      Homeless men on the Bowery in New York City, c. 1978.

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