TODAY'S INSPIRATIONAL “MYTHOLOGICAL MAGIC”
Kung Fu Panda 2
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While many of us will be spending today traveling and preparing for Labor Day, finalizing our plans for a pastiche of gatherings, BBQ's, and parties celebrating this holiday, today also marks a very SPECIAL DAY for one of the most revered SOULS this planet has ever been privileged to have grace it's holy ground. Later today, Mother Teresa of Kolkata will be canonized by Pope Francis in Rome!! Standing a mere 5 FT in height, this diminutive LightWorker carved a path of LOVE, CARE, and COMPASSION, and left a Legacy unlike anything this world has ever bared witness to. Her favorite motto was: “Do small things with great LOVE.”
However, the ‘small things’ she did captivated a world full of greed, jealousy, and judgement. For her efforts, she was showered with honorary degrees and awards too many to list! During her lifetime, she was sought out by presidents, philanthropists, and iconoclasts of every faith and ethnicity. Even luminaries of great wealth and influence pleaded for just a few minutes of her time.
Although she did honor many requests, she ALWAYS returned back to her chosen home of India, to care for those forgotten SPIRITS that she loved the most; the lonely, disenfranchised, homeless, disease ravaged, and dying. The poorest of the poor. And in the process hoping to give a template and example of how to live to the entire planet. She truly believed that LOVE and CARING are the keys to a better world!
“The biggest disease today,” she once said, “is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for, and deserted by everyone. The greatest evil is the lack of LOVE and charity, the terrible indifference toward one another's neighbor who lives on the roadside, assaulted by exploitation, corruption, poverty and disease.”
This tiny, yet wizened woman opened houses for the destitute and dying, for those with AIDS, for orphans and for people with leprosy. Her legacy also includes homes for the poor built in Cuba and the then Soviet Union- both countries NOT generally in allowance of foreign church workers.
My favorite story, and there are so many to choose from, is from 1982. Israeli troops were holding Beirut underseige in an effort to root out the Palestine Liberation Organization. Mother Theresa visited a community of her nuns at Spring School, a home for the aged in East Beirut. It may have been her FIRST visit to a war torn zone, but was certainly not her last! She decided to meet with Red Cross officials about the relief needs in the area. She was immediately taken to a nearby mental hospital that had just been bombed, requiring the evacuation of 37 mentally and physically handicapped children. And with out skipping a beat, do you know what she said?! “Give them all to me. I will take them.” If ONLY we all cherished our fellow brethren in such a manner. Oh what a wondrous world this could be!
Filled with absolute humility even when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway in 1979, she accepted it in the name of “the hungry, of the naked, of the homeless, of the blind, of the lepers, of all those who feel unwanted unloved, uncared for throughout society. The people I serve are helpless. They cannot stand. They cannot even hold the rod. I will give them the food and then send them to you so you can teach them how to fish.”
As most of the New Age Nerd community is aware, I live in the Washington, DC area. And in 1982, Mother Theresa actually visited the Arlington , Virginia Diocese to address the priests in our community. I would like to leave today's post with an excerpt from the speech she gave that day.
“When I find a man hungry in the street, I give him a bit of bread, or a bit of rice or something; but when I visit a shopping mall in a big city like London or even here, I STILL see the need for a tender, persevering compassion. What I can hear in the shoutings is the loneliness; people are so hurt, so painful inside. Nakedness is not only for a piece of cloth. We have stripped away from the poor their dignity. We have so many adjectives for the poor. We think they are good for nothing, they're lazy, they're this, they're that. Homelessness is not only for a house made of bricks. The most important thing is that we cannot give away that which we do not have. We cannot help people to holiness if WE ARE NOT HOLY. It is there, for that reason, that I ask that we all pray for the poor people. The closer I get to the poor people, from what I understand, the more I see I receive more from them than they receive from me. I have received tremendous graces from my poor people. So let us ask God to give us the opportunity to understand that presence of Christ, for HE has said, “You did it to ME.”
It is my heartfelt DESIRE that the words in today's post may bring a true understanding of the importance of not shutting a door to the face of the needs that surround us all. There are SO many ways that each and everyone of us can make a difference to those who truly require our LOVE and CARE. Please Re-member that WE ARE ALL ONE. And that what you do unto your brother, you do unto yourself..........
Nerdmaste,
Jeffrey Louis Martinez
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