The intention of the film “The Miracle of Mother Teresa” is not to offer a complete vision of the life of Mother Teresa, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, her personality, the mystery of her soul, her spirituality, or her mission, it simply tries to take us to the heart of Mother Teresa, offering the viewer some of her fundamental traits, not from the perspective of those who knew her or the viewer but from the interior of her soul, as if the director had entered into her depths and had installed his camera there to record the world around her, her relationship with God and her perception of herself from his perspective.
Those who knew her personally may be disappointed not to find in the film the image that they formed of the mother of the poor. The angle from which he introduces us to her is the interior miracle of this woman dedicated to God who, subjected to a profound test of faith from the beginning of her mission with the poorest, is faithful to Jesus and the ardent supplication until the end that before plunging into the streets of Calcutta, He directed her.
It expresses very well a trait of Mother Teresa regarding her mission: her determination, her holy impatience, and her uncontrollable urgency to carry out exactly and to the end the cry with which Jesus called her: quench her thirst for love, for dignity, for respect, of tenderness and compassion in the poorest.
Offering a general image of a personality as profound and astonishingly extraordinary as that of Saint Teresa of Calcutta from the perspective of her “dark night”, with the complexity that this fact common to so many saints have, is not an easy task, but one full of enormous risks. The probability that such a laudable attempt will end in a fatal outcome is very high. A difficult and risky attempt that the director faces quite successfully.
Although it is true that only those who lived with her and accompanied her spiritual path can provide definitive elements to achieve a more complete image of the rich, but also hidden mystery that surrounded her throughout her life as a Missionary of Charity, that a work does not pretend nor can it exhaust a complete image of the person it presents, much less of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, it still makes it valuable.
It presents two stories in parallel: that of the great missionary and mother of the poor, first of Calcutta and then of the world, Mother Teresa, and that of Kavita, a young artist, agnostic, modern and bohemian, who has to face the responsibility of an unwanted pregnancy, the result of a naive and immature relationship with a young man who is profoundly immature and incapable of assuming his responsibility towards her, towards his own fatherhood and towards his son.
Faced with the moral question that the young woman asks herself, what should I do?, the only answer she receives from her environment (partner, family, health system) is abortion. The girl’s need for her partner to accompany her responsibly at a time like this is confronted with the immaturity and irresponsibility of her partner, who leaves her completely alone, immaturely and selfishly evading his responsibility as a father, cowardly disappearing from her life and carrying on her the decision to get rid of the baby.
The film very vividly raises the sense of responsibility towards nascent life, in the light of the moral conscience of the young woman who, after a first moment of denial, trying to escape from the fact of being a mother and justifying abortion, comes to become aware of the dignity of the life she carries in her womb even at the cost of being alone, choosing in the end the life of her son. A process framed in a trip to Calcutta and illuminated by the courage and determination of Mother Teresa in the face of abortion and the sacred dignity of all human life and by the tenderness and compassion of the Missionaries of Charity, with whom she providentially meets. Her meeting with Mother Teresa, her daughters and her collaborators, opens her, without her realizing it, to the sense of human dignity and the sacred value of life. An unexpected discovery that connects her to Mother Teresa leads to her final determination to embrace the life of her son. The dilemma that this young woman has to face is not so much whether she wants to have her child, but rather that of accepting a child that has already come, that is already inside her and that, being hers, is not her, and, therefore, with an inviolable dignity, beyond all the voices that invite her to get rid of him; not whether she decides to have it or not, but to bravely accept that she already has it.
After the internal conflict with her freedom and her responsibility towards her already-born son, the film shows a woman deeply in need of being loved unconditionally, to love and to find a love with which to share her life, a woman full of contradictions who drowns her in a tormenting longing to be loved and to love, trying to escape her personal responsibility but not daring to end her son’s life either.
Her encounter with Mother Teresa and the contemplation of the mystery of compassion that is revealed to her through the Missionaries of Charity and her own personal involvement with them, opens a gap in her heart, making him progressively aware of the dignity and sacred value of human life, even that which in the eyes of men seems to have no value, dismantling their own arguments regarding abortion, justification of a false charity that conceals their fear of seeing their freedom and independence limited and of conditioning their future.
In contrast to her, Mother Teresa appears luminous, full of self-forgetfulness, love for life, aware of the sacred dignity of all human life and full of compassion for every man, particularly for the poorest, alone and abandoned.
She extraordinarily reveals Mother Teresa’s inner loneliness before Jesus, before her “call within her call,” before the men who surround her and before the poorest of the poor. A deep interior loneliness before a Jesus whom she neither feels nor hears, which she recognizes as his insistent call addressed to her to share with Him both the loneliness and darkness that He experienced during his Passion and death on Calvary (“I thirst.” ) as well as that she can hear the heartbreaking cry of the poorest of the poor into whose darkness he had to mystically descend. The film wants to show the mystery that Mother Teresa hides in her heart, the mystery of her call, that of a Jesus who told her: “Come be my light”, “take me where there is darkness”, having to descend spiritually to her.
It vigorously shows a Mother Teresa, small and vulnerable before the mystery of her call, but determined, tenacious, unbreakable, full of supernatural faith and trust, and a conviction that burns tormentingly in her heart: “God cannot wait.”
It also presents her complete trust in Jesus and in the Church, submitting her judgment to her spiritual director, the bishop and the Pope for approval of her call and to continue in it.
Freed from the disturbing voice of the tempter (“a single word and everything will be returned to you again” – the affection of the people she had loved until then and the safety of the convent), she can hear the heartbreaking cry of the poorest of the people. poor (understanding that they need her as much as she needs them to find Jesus), and give herself tirelessly to them.
The film does not present her as a philanthropist who acts out of mere human compassion or bad conscience, nor by relying on her strength. Her natural compassion is joined by a supernatural compassion that is born from her divine obsession with Jesus, from her desire to quench the thirst of her Heart in its poorest state: “I am thirsty”, and from an inner movement that irrepressibly drags her. In them, she recognizes him, welcomes him, embraces him, heals him, listens to him and accompanies him in her agony.
She continually appears praying, putting her trust in Jesus. At the beginning of her path, in the midst of the most difficult trials, saying: “He always protects us” – says the script -. She lives in the continuous presence of Jesus, even in his deepest inner darkness. He is her obsession, her only love, the absolute meaning of her entire existence, her Everything. And she never stops believing in his love: “He loves us all; I’m sure of it.” She continually talks to Him, she does not stop calling Him, even shouting at Him – as prayer is shown so many times in Scripture – even though she cannot hear His voice. One of the most eloquent signs that Jesus is with her and that he responds to her are the new sisters who join her in increasing numbers. There she sees the response of Jesus to her. He doesn’t respond with words. The growth of her work, consolation for the thirsty Heart of Jesus and for the disinherited of the world, is the answer to her cry, to her prayer. Jesus remains silent, but he lives within her, accompanies her, confirms her, sustains her and provides for her needs and those of her poor.
In the film, faced with her greatest loneliness and inner darkness, Mother Teresa finds comfort in the mysterious presence of her mother, who from Albania accompanied and supported her missionary daughter with her prayer. Image of her that evokes the Mater Dolorosa, the Virgin of Sorrows, who in her darkest darkness and in her helplessness mysteriously accompanies her and supports her with maternal tenderness.
The tape shows her heart in love with her: “I love God with all the strength of my soul.” But she lives her love in darkness, loneliness, inner emptiness and apparent separation from Him, a test to which mystics and many saints have been subjected with different intensity and duration. Greatest proof of love for Him and true interior miracle that has made her a giant of charity! She always accepts that darkness again to console Jesus and those who in her sufferings find themselves in darkness and cannot see God or his love.
The doubt in her faith that assails him is part of the test of faith and the dark night that Jesus made him go through. She participated in the darkness of her poor so she could pity them from below, not from above, exactly like Jesus did. Compassion from above humiliates, compassion from below welcomes, accompanies, lifts up, dignifies, sustains, reveals the mystery of love… she feels a deep inner emptiness as if there were nothing, only darkness. But she continues to trust in Jesus and her spiritual director, accepting that darkness and the pain it causes her as part of her mission to collaborate with Jesus in the salvation of the poorest of the poor.
She descends with Jesus and her sisters to the darkest darkness, to the most terrible hells, of the poorest and most unfortunate, to love Jesus there. In the thirst of the dying she hears the cry of Jesus in agony from the cross: “I am thirsty” (Mt 27, 48; Mk 15, 36; Lk 23, 36; Jn 4, 10; 19, 28). Spousally associated with Him, she has to share the agony of her divine Husband, the darkness into which He descended, drinking from the chalice of anguish of the Father’s apparent abandonment that He drank: “My God, my God, why have you made me abandoned!” (Ps 21; Mt 27, 46 and Mc 15, 33).
It is legitimate to think that the film fails to fully express the mystery of Mother Teresa and the phenomenon of her “dark night,” but a simple look can find not only in the Mother’s words but also in her silences and in the cry of her heart addressed to Jesus an eloquent expression of that test of faith.
At the end of the film, the director shows the fulfilled life of Mother Teresa, in response to the call she received from Jesus, with an expression that he puts in her mouth: “I have done exactly what He told me exactly to do.”
The final outcome of Tavita’s story, a symbolic image of Mother Teresa’s work, of the fruitfulness of her charity, is also part of the Mother’s miracle, of the fruitfulness of her life. A fruitfulness that was first internal, with her obedience and heroic trust in Jesus, and then external, with all the richness of the charisma of the Missionaries of Charity.
This film is a new and precious opportunity to remember the secret and mystery hidden for years of Mother Teresa, a true provocation to bring us closer to her soul, to her mission, and with it to the mystery of love, tenderness and compassion. of Jesus; a song to the life and dignity of every human person, no matter how fragile and apparently useless or painful it may be; a film that brings tears to our eyes of deep emotion at the beauty of the love, tenderness and compassion of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Saint Teresa of Calcutta!, and of what her love, which is none other than that of the Heart of Jesus in her and with her, he has done in his spiritual daughters and sons and is capable of doing in each of us if we open ourselves to him.
