Mother Teresa: Love in Action

43.3-2.10 Framing Series, Set 2 of 3 (Thinkers of Our Age): Essay 10

Welcome

As I make a few final edits to this essay on Memorial Day morning, I find myself thinking about sacrifice, remembrance, and the people whose lives continue shaping us long after they are gone. That naturally brings Mother Teresa back into focus for me, along with the stories this essay keeps pulling back into full light. Some are from childhood. Some are from Kolkata. Some are from home, work, my daughters, my mom, my sister, Mary, and a man named Dana whom I met at a bus stop in Minnesota. Her life does not stay safely in history for me. It keeps reaching into ordinary places where love either becomes visible or it does not.

Mother Teresa stayed close to suffering when distance would have been easier. She moved toward people most others had already learned to pass by. That kind of presence asks more of me than respect from a distance. It asks whether love is still love if it never becomes inconvenient.

That question has become harder for me as I have gotten older, not easier. It shows up when I am walking toward a meeting, driving to pick up my daughters, decompressing after a long day, working near the street as a neighbor walks by, or facing a need I did not expect. I can appreciate service in the abstract, but Mother Teresa does not let me leave it there. She keeps bringing love down into the next act, the next interruption, and the next person who may never be able to thank me or offer anything in return.

That is why this essay unsettles me. It is not mainly about honoring a saint from a distance. It is about being confronted by a life that forced love into action. Mother Teresa did not simply speak of love, intend love, or praise love. She practiced it, often in places where most people would have turned away. She did not wait for hardship to become efficient, attractive, measurable, or easy to explain. She stayed close enough to touch it. That is a different standard, and it reaches deep into my own life.

Why I Chose Mother Teresa

I chose Mother Teresa because she exposes the gap between loving humanity in general and loving the person in front of me. It is easy to care about the poor as an idea. It is much harder to sit beside one person, listen without rushing, notice what dignity requires in that moment, and stay present when the situation does not resolve. Her life does not allow compassion to remain a feeling. It becomes hands, time, attention, patience, and the willingness to be inconvenienced without turning service into performance.

She also belongs in this set because her life was not impressive in the way modern culture often trains us to admire. She became globally known, but the center of her work was repetitive and unglamorous: feeding, washing, holding, listening, receiving the unwanted, and staying near people who were dying. Doing the same difficult work again the next day. That is what confronts me. Not scale first or visibility first, but faithfulness to the person directly in front of you.

There is also something deeply personal underneath this essay for me. My mom was a Sister of Charity of Saint Augustine for 13 years before she met my dad and married him. Mother Teresa was not part of that same order. She founded the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, and that distinction is important. Still, the phrase Sisters of Charity has always carried weight for me because of my mom. When I think of Mother Teresa, I cannot separate her from my mother’s earlier life of faith, service, discipline, and formation. I knew her as my mom, as an artist, musician, poet, calligrapher, and the center of warmth in our home, but that formation was part of the woman who raised me. Mother Teresa brings that earlier part of my mom’s life closer to me in a way I still find difficult to explain.

That connection became even stronger for me this year when Pope Leo XIV visited Algeria and walked in the footsteps of Saint Augustine at Hippo. His Augustinian connection, my mom’s years with the Sisters of Charity of Saint Augustine, and the broader Catholic memory around service and formation all seemed to intersect in a way I did not expect. Mother Teresa was not from Algeria. She was born in Skopje, in what is now North Macedonia, and was of Albanian heritage. Still, I kept thinking about how those threads unexpectedly fit together. Augustine, my mom, the idea of charity, and Mother Teresa’s life of enacted love all pointed me toward the same question. By the time I finished rereading her story, it no longer felt distant from my own life.

The Question That Refuses to Leave

The question that keeps returning is direct enough that I cannot hide from it for long.

Will I serve the person in front of me, or will I keep walking toward the work I planned?

Not simply do I care? Not simply do I believe in helping others? I mean something more direct than that. When someone interrupts my plan, do I still see them? When a need appears at the wrong time, do I treat it as an inconvenience or as a human being? Where do I want credit for what should simply be done? Where do I separate important work from daily faithfulness at home? These questions do not wait for dramatic circumstances. They show up in the next 10 minutes.

That is what makes Mother Teresa difficult for me. Her life does not let me hide inside intention. I may not always have cash on me. I may not be able to solve every situation. I may not know the right response every time I encounter someone who is poor, sick, lonely, unstable, or simply in need of attention. But I can still see the person. I can still stop, listen, and refuse to let someone become invisible to me because I am busy, uncertain, or uncomfortable.

The question becomes sharper because I have never really felt invisible. I have known grief, dyslexia, confusion, and loss, but I have not lived with the ache of being unseen by nearly everyone who passes. There is a difference between struggling in life and feeling as though your existence barely registers to the people around you. Mother Teresa forces me to confront that difference instead of explaining it away from a comfortable distance.

The Life and the Pressure

Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910 in Skopje. She later joined the Sisters of Loreto, went to India, taught in Calcutta, and eventually felt called to leave the classroom and live among the poorest of the poor. In 1950, the Missionaries of Charity were officially established in the Archdiocese of Calcutta. Two years later, she opened what became known as the Nirmal Hriday or Home for the Dying Destitute, a place where people abandoned or left to die on the street could be received with care. That image stays important because it reveals the center of her work. She was not merely creating programs. She was creating places where the unwanted would be wanted, even at the end.

Her canonization in 2016 followed the Catholic Church’s formal process of recognizing heroic virtue and miracles attributed to her intercession. Those miracles carry significance within the life of the Church because sainthood is not simply sentimental recognition. It involves careful investigation and discernment about whether a life reflected heroic holiness. Yet for me, the most instructive part of Mother Teresa’s sainthood is not only the miraculous. It is the ordinary faithfulness that came long before it. The miracles may point beyond her, but the daily work reveals what she kept choosing over and over again.

That difference becomes important because sainthood can sound distant if I let it. It can become something placed safely in stained glass, beyond ordinary reach. Mother Teresa resists that kind of distance. Her life was filled with bodily work, uncomfortable proximity, repetition, doubt, criticism, and the reality of people who did not get better. Her private writings later revealed long periods of interior darkness, which makes the outward faithfulness even more serious. She was not serving because every day felt spiritually rewarding. She was serving because love had become obedience, and obedience had become action.

The pressure Mother Teresa brings feels different from many of the other thinkers in this set. Frankl wrestles with response under suffering. Hanh draws attention back to awareness under stress. Grandin changes how we think about perception and design. Lewis examines what we love and what shapes us. Mother Teresa presses on something more immediate: whether love becomes visible when there is no clean outcome. Her life asks whether I am willing to remain faithful when nothing changes, when the same need returns tomorrow, when the person cannot thank me clearly, and when the act itself may be known only to God.

The Conviction That Endured

The conviction I take most seriously from Mother Teresa is that love must become concrete or it remains incomplete. Words, intentions, and prayer are each important, but the person in front of us still has to be fed, washed, heard, carried, visited, or comforted with dignity. Her life narrows the distance between values, belief, and action until I cannot comfortably separate what I believe from what I actually do. The question is not whether I admire service. The question is whether I will serve when the moment is small, inconvenient, and unlikely to be remembered.

I think about four anchors here: presence, faithfulness, attention, and action, all held together by love. Presence asks whether I am really with the person in front of me or only physically nearby. Faithfulness asks whether I will continue showing up when nothing seems to change. Attention asks whether I notice what is actually needed rather than what is easiest for me to offer. Action asks whether love has moved from thought into behavior. Mother Teresa helps me see these are not separate ideas. Presence without love can become obligation. Action without love can become performance. Attention without love can become analysis. Faithfulness without love can become duty without warmth.

That conviction reaches home before it reaches the street. It shapes the way I kiss my daughters good night and whisper my love and pride into their ears, even when I am not sure they hear me. It shapes the way I respond when Hanna is out with my dad and I am home with my 3Ms, no devices, no distraction, just the responsibility and gift of being fully there. It even shows up in small decisions, like whether I put earbuds in while working near the street or leave myself open to a neighbor who may want to stop and talk. None of that sounds heroic. That is part of the point. If love only becomes real in dramatic moments, most of daily life is left untouched.

I have also learned that service becomes easier to analyze than to practice. It is easier to critique methods, records, appearances, or outcomes from a distance than to remain near suffering day after day. Some criticisms are fair and should be taken seriously. But there is still a difference between observing difficult conditions and choosing to step into them consistently, especially when the work is repetitive, emotionally heavy, and unlikely to produce polished results.

This is also where Mother Teresa connects to the starfish thrower for me, though in a more demanding way. She did not measure her work by scale, recognition, or clean outcomes. She measured it by proximity. By whether she stayed. By whether she kept showing up when the same need returned again the next day. Critics have raised serious questions, and those deserve careful attention. Still, what I cannot ignore is the discipline of remaining near suffering without turning away. Not solving it from a distance, but refusing to step back from it up close. That is where her life presses me most.

Where This Confronts My Own Story

My earliest memory of Mother Teresa goes back to childhood, when my family went to see a movie about her at an old theater in Edina that no longer exists. The film was Mother Teresa, the 1986 documentary that followed her work among the poorest of the poor in Kolkata. I remember it feeling stark and difficult to watch as a young child. It was not entertainment. It was one of those early experiences where I understood that watching something could be formative, not because it was pleasant, but because it made me see a part of the world I could not unsee afterward.

Years later, that childhood memory came back to me in Kolkata. I helped organize three team-building experiences at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying. The first time, the Mother Superior was not going to allow us to participate because we had not completed the normal orientation. I understood why. This was not a tourist stop or a corporate activity. It was a sacred and serious place. But when I told her my mom had been a Sister of Charity of Saint Augustine, something shifted. She allowed us to serve. That moment has remained unusually vivid for me. It felt as if my mom’s hidden life before my dad and before us had quietly opened a door for me halfway around the world.

Those visits exposed something in me because they were unlike anything I expected. In most workplaces, team building becomes games, exercises, and clever activities meant to strengthen relationships. This was different. We were feeding people, massaging hands and feet, sitting beside men whose lives were near the end, and trying to offer care without turning the moment into a story about ourselves. We were visitors. The sisters and volunteers who returned day after day carried the deeper work. Still, being there revealed the difference between serving as an event and serving as a life.

On one of those visits, I sat beside a man who seemed confused and withdrawn, perhaps battling dementia or some other condition I did not understand. I began rubbing his hands. He could not really speak, and there was no conversation between us. He was quiet, nearly emotionless, and I remember looking into his eyes as I sat there beside him. Then something happened that I still do not know how to explain. I saw my mom. Not as a vague memory or an idea I was trying to force. I felt, as clear as day, that I was somehow with her again.

I am careful with language around experiences like that because I do not want to make claims beyond what I know. I only know what it felt like to me. It was a gift. I had believed I would never again be in my mom’s physical presence, never again look into eyes and feel that bodily nearness. Yet there, beside a man I did not know, in a place devoted to those the world often passes by, something of my mom felt present to me. That moment alone would have been enough to keep Mother Teresa close in my memory.

The second time something like that happened was much more recent, and much closer to home. I had just dropped the girls off at their school near my office and was mentally preparing for a meeting I was looking forward to. As I drove along the main road, I noticed a bus stop with belongings gathered under a tarp and a large shopping cart nearby. An older man was sitting beside it all. I passed him at first, but something in me did not let the moment go. I turned around, parked nearby, and walked toward him.

I did not want to startle him, so I greeted him before getting too close. I crouched down and asked if I could buy him lunch, though it was still morning. I had folded up $20 to give him. He was reading the Bible, and the page was in Malachi. That detail caught me because only a few months earlier I had met the first person I had ever known named Malachi. When I mentioned that, he smiled and told me he bet I had never met a man named Dana. I laughed because I had crossed paths with a Dana the day before, a man retired from my company who still regularly brings University of Minnesota tour groups through our workplace.

His name was Dana too. The conversation kept opening from there. He told me he had been raised in Inver Grove Heights, not far away, and spoke about work, family, mistakes, shelters, and the ways his life had broken apart more than once. He still dreamed, at 64 years old, of becoming a die cutter or forklift operator again, work he said he had mastered earlier in life. At one point, he looked down and realized I had placed money in his hand. He told me the money would help because antibiotics for a persistent cough had recently been stolen from him after he left a bag unattended while using a restroom. I did not know whether every detail was accurate. But the truthfulness of every detail was not the only thing happening there. His voice carried gratitude and a kind of positivity that did not match the difficulty of his circumstances.

At some point he showed me the back of his Bible, where he said he had written an acronym for BIBLE: Be Informed Before Leaving Earth. Much of the writing looked like a cluster of letters I could not fully make out, but the phrase clearly carried meaning for him, so I listened. I wrote down the link to my blog and invited him to follow along if he wanted to. I told him about my sister, Mary, and how, like Dana, there were times in her life when she ended up living on the streets. I do not usually share something like that with someone I have just met, but by then the conversation no longer felt distant or transactional. He had become a real person to me, not someone I was simply passing on the way to something else.

Then something happened that took me back to Kolkata. As I looked at Dana and listened to his voice, I felt, for the first time since my sister died more than two years ago, as if I were somehow in Mary’s presence again. It was different from the experience with my mom. With the man in Kolkata, it was his eyes. With Dana, it was more in the voice, the pace, the fragility, and the intelligence beneath the surface. Again, I am not trying to explain it. I only know that it was a second gift I never expected to receive.

That is why Mother Teresa’s work comes back to me through these two men. In Kolkata, the man I sat beside gave me my mom back for a moment. In Minnesota, Dana gave me Mary back for a moment. I know they were their own persons, not stand-ins for the people I lost. Still, something in those encounters opened a door I did not expect. I only know it does not happen when I stay distant. It seems to happen when I remain long enough to truly see the person in front of me.

The next day, after I had given Dana more money and gone on with my schedule, I saw him again on the sidewalk outside my office while I was driving to pick up the girls. I did not stop. When I mentioned this to my eldest daughter, she became upset and asked why he was not in the car and why we were not bringing him home. It was a child’s question, and it went straight to the place adults often manage to avoid. Mother Teresa brought people home, at least into a home of care, when others saw them as unwanted, unclean, or too complicated. My daughter’s question left me with my own: Where do I need to see more, do more, recognize more, and give more than I currently do?

I do not always know or own the answer to that question. I know there are organizations like Union Gospel Mission doing hard daily work with people whose lives are complicated in ways I may never fully understand. I know safety, discernment, and boundaries are important. But I also know those truths can become hiding places if I am not careful. Mother Teresa does not let me use complexity as an excuse for indifference or inaction. She forces the simpler question first. Did I see the person, or did I protect myself from seeing?

What I Want My Daughters to Carry

Some of the most important parts of this essay do not happen in Kolkata. They happen at home. They happen when one of my daughters wants to tell me a long story while I am distracted. They happen when I am tired at the end of the day and still choose to sit beside them a little longer. They happen in interruptions, small conversations, car rides, late-night prayers, and ordinary moments that are easy to overlook while they are happening. Mother Teresa keeps pressing me back toward the possibility that love is proven there first.

I do not want my daughters to grow up believing compassion is mainly about admiration for heroic people far away. I want them to understand that love is revealed by how we treat the person who interrupts us, needs us, slows us down, or cannot give anything back. I want them to know that the person in front of them is never beneath their attention, even when the situation is uncomfortable or difficult to understand.

I also want them to understand that faithfulness begins close to home. If I write about Mother Teresa but fail to be present when my daughters need me, then I have misunderstood something important. Some of the most meaningful parts of fatherhood happen in moments that would never look important from the outside: sitting and listening when I am distracted, staying patient when I am tired, answering one more question before bed, or putting my phone down when one of the girls wants my attention. Love in action is not only what happens in Kolkata or at a bus stop. It is also what happens quietly inside a family, where people learn whether they are truly seen, heard, and valued.

I want them to learn that interruptions can become gifts. That does not mean every interruption should be obeyed, or that boundaries have no place. It means they should not build lives so efficient that people become obstacles. When I have 10 extra minutes because a meeting ends early, I want to ask better questions. Who could I call? Who could I text? Who might need encouragement? My daughters do not need a lecture on presence if they can see me practice it.

The ability to see people who are often unseen is something I hope my daughters carry forward. Poverty is not only the absence of money. It can also be the absence of being noticed, known, remembered, or treated as fully human. I have never lived with that kind of invisibility, but I can empathize enough to know I do not want to add to it. If my daughters become women who notice the lonely, difficult, or overlooked person, then something of Mother Teresa’s lesson will have passed into our home in a meaningful way.

Most of all, I want them to know that faithfulness does not always feel significant while it is happening. Playing cribbage or gin rummy with my sister, Mary, during difficult periods of her life was presence without demand. Visiting my mom at Presbyterian Homes during the later years of her life and spooning lunch to her when she could no longer speak was love without needing anything in return. Being home with my 3Ms while Hanna is out with my dad reminds me that hidden faithfulness shapes a family. These are not grand acts. They are the small repeated acts that quietly tell the truth about who we are becoming.

Leadership Under Constraint

Mother Teresa’s life also confronts leadership, but not in the usual way. She does not first ask whether a leader has vision, strategy, influence, or scale. She asks whether a leader sees the person who cannot advance the mission, improve the metrics, or make the leader look good. That is a harder test than most leadership language admits. Many leaders can serve upward, outward, or publicly. Fewer can serve quietly, consistently, and without needing to be seen doing it.

I think about this in the office through the old phrase my dad used, MBWA, or managing by walking around. At its best, that was never simply a technique. It was a way of being present, noticing people before a formal issue appeared, hearing what would never make it into a report, and showing by physical presence that people were valued beyond their output. Like any phrase, it can become empty if it turns into performance. But when practiced honestly, it reminds me that leadership often happens in ordinary contact, not only in meetings or decisions.

The leaders I trust most have usually been people who did small things with care. They noticed when someone was struggling. They gave attention without making a show of it. They served quietly and moved on. They did not need credit for everything they made possible. That kind of leadership is disciplined. It resists the ego’s need to be seen and chooses usefulness instead. Mother Teresa raises that standard even higher because she served people who could not reward her, promote her, protect her reputation, or make her work look efficient.

This is where I have to confront myself honestly. I like building things. I like meaningful projects. I like the idea of the farm, our sanctuary in Indonesia and property in Costa Rica, these essays, the future work, and the larger frame of a life that contributes. Those are good things, but they can still become excuses if I miss the person directly in front of me. None of it carries much weight if I cannot stop for Dana at the bus stop, listen to one of my daughters when I am tired, or notice the person nearby who has no role in my plans.

I am still discovering how often service appears in ordinary moments. Some days I move too quickly. Some days I choose efficiency when presence would have been better. Some days I want the meaningful version of service more than the inconvenient one. Mother Teresa keeps pulling me back toward the ordinary moments where love either becomes visible or it does not.

Reflection Point

Love becomes real when it becomes action for the person in front of us.

The Lesson: Love in Action

Love is not complete as intention. It becomes credible when it takes form in presence, attention, and action.

The person in front of us is not always an interruption to the work. Often, that person is the work.

Faithfulness is often built through small acts repeated when nothing feels dramatic and no one is watching.

Service loses something important when it becomes self-display. It deepens when usefulness matters more than visibility.

Practical Takeaways

Notice one person today whom you would normally pass by, and give that person your full attention.

Do one small act of care at home without announcing it or expecting recognition.

When interrupted, pause before deciding whether the interruption is a burden or an invitation.

Choose usefulness over visibility in one concrete situation this week.

Two Questions to Explore

Who is in front of me right now, and am I fully there?

Where am I choosing visibility over usefulness?

Further Resources

Links are not provided here because they often expire or change over time. The titles below are listed clearly so they can be easily searched and accessed at your convenience.

Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light. A collection of private writings that reveals the interior darkness, discipline, and faithfulness behind her public life of service.

Mother Teresa, No Greater Love. A collection of reflections on prayer, service, poverty, love, and the daily practice of seeing Christ in the person directly in front of us.

Mother Teresa (1986). A feature-length documentary that brought viewers into her daily work in Kolkata, showing service among the dying and the poor as physical, repetitive, and close.

Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God. The documentary and later book that helped introduce Mother Teresa’s work in Kolkata to a wider audience.

The Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25. The passage on feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, and seeing Christ in those who are easiest to overlook.

Thank you for continuing this journey with me. Mother Teresa brings this series back to something simple and difficult. Love must become visible. I do not write that as someone who consistently lives it well. I write it because I have been given experiences, in Kolkata, beside Dana, with my daughters, with my mom, with Mary, and in ordinary days at home and work, where the question becomes difficult to ignore. Many of the experiences that shape us do not feel especially significant while they are happening. Sometimes their meaning only becomes clear later.

We choose who we become.

Live. Lead. Love.
Billy

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Explore the Foundation Series Introduction · Explore the Load-Bearing Series Introduction · Explore the Framing Series Introduction · Explore the Framing Series, Set 1 (Parables) Introduction · Explore the Framing Series, Set 2 (Thinkers) Introduction