Feast of St. Teresa of Calcutta

Today we remember St. Teresa of Calcutta or as many of us remember with love - Mother Teresa. Pope Francis canonized Saint Teresa a saint at the Vatican on Sunday, September 4, 2016.  Her life was dedicated to serving Jesus by serving the poorest of the poor.  Mother Teresa held a firm belief that prayer - especially prayer before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament was the key to the work of The Missionary Sisters of Charity which she founded.  It is the key for all of us striving to live a life of faith and service to God.

Mother Teresa spoke at the 1976 Eucharistic Congress and shared these thoughts:

“..To be able to live this life of vows, these four vows, we need our life to be woven with the Eucharist. That’s why we begin our day with Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. With him, we go forward. And when we come back in the evening we have one hour of adoration before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, and at this you will be surprised, that we have not had to cut down our work for the poor….….It has brought us so close to each other. We love each other better, but I think we love the poor with greater and deeper faith and love.”

 

Let us pray together as Mother Teresa’s Sisters do at the end of every Mass:

 

The Fragrance Prayer 

(Originally composed by St. John Henry Newman as Radiating Christ and adapted by Mother Teresa to be prayed as a group)

 

Dear Jesus, help us to spread your fragrance everywhere we go. Flood our souls with your spirit and life. Penetrate and possess our whole being so utterly, that our lives may only be a radiance of yours.

Shine through us, and be so in us, that every person we should come in contact with may feel your presence in our soul. Let them look up and see no longer us, but only Jesus.

Stay with us, and then we shall begin to shine as you shine; so to shine as to be a light to others; the light, Jesus, will be all from you. None of it will be ours.
It will be you shining on others through us.

Let us thus praise you in the way you love best, by shining on those around us. Let us preach you without preaching: not by words, but by our example, by the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what we do, the evident fullness of the love our hearts bear for you.  Amen.