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TERESA-LANGFORD Nov-19-2008 (650 words) With photo and book cover. xxxn
Mother Teresa still has lessons to teach world, says priest-author
By Nancy Frazier O'Brien
Catholic News Service
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- More than 10 years after her death, Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta still has lessons to teach the world, according to the priest who co-founded the Missionaries of Charity Fathers with her and has written a new book about her.
Father Joseph Langford, a 57-year-old native of Toledo, Ohio, said he wrote "Mother Teresa's Secret Fire" (Our Sunday Visitor, $19.95) to try to explain "what made Mother Teresa Mother Teresa" and how she sustained hope, joy and a belief in the possibility of change in the face of inner and external challenges.
"As America faces its own dark night of the soul," he said, Mother Teresa shows Americans and the rest of the world "how to live joyfully, creatively, in a way that leaves a legacy."
In a Nov. 18 interview with Catholic News Service, Father Langford said Mother Teresa asked him to write the book after she revealed to him in 1986 the details of her "call within a call" 40 years earlier.
On a day in 1946 that she came to call "inspiration day," as she was on a train to Darjeeling, India, to begin a retreat, Mother Teresa heard a call from God to give up her safe, relatively comfortable life as a schoolteacher and as a Sister of Loreto to live among the destitute and dying in Calcutta and establish a new religious community.
"She was not special, she was not unique, she had no special support system, and look what she did," the priest said.
Father Langford, ordained a priest of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary in 1978, was inspired to join in Mother Teresa's work by another book about her, Malcolm Muggeridge's "Something Beautiful for God." Together they founded the Missionaries of Charity Fathers in 1984; the order has its international headquarters in Tijuana, Mexico.
"My first meeting with her was mediated by a book," he said. "So I wanted to pay forward the blessing of having been close to her for 30 years."
The Albanian-born nun told Father Langford about her transformational experience as they were preparing a constitution for the priests' branch of the Missionaries of Charity.
"There were things I wanted to include in the constitution about her way of seeing things, of experiencing things," he said. After she told her story, she told the priest, "One day you must tell the others."
The revelation that came to Mother Teresa on the train to Darjeeling centers on "the mystery of Jesus' thirst." Although Father Langford said the concept is too complex to summarize in a few words, Mother Teresa once called it "the depths of God's infinite longing to love and be loved."
"She was convinced that grace was given not only to a few but to everybody -- for the poorest of the poor and for the rest of us, as much as we could accept our own poverty," he said.
The book features many of Mother Teresa's own letters and other writings, which Father Langford said show "a tremendous depth of theology that I think is going to surprise people."
He also said many people misunderstood the message contained in a collection of her writings published last year as "Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light." In the book, Mother Teresa described her own crises of faith and said she felt for many years that God had abandoned her.
By revealing her own inner struggles, Mother Teresa showed others the way out of darkness, Father Langford said, praising her ability to "make life beautiful where it is ugliest."
"I have seen with my own eyes how her message can touch, heal and change lives," he said. "My hope is that her message will transform the reader's life, even as it already has for so many others."
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Copyright (c) 2008 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
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