SEEKER OF SOULS

Souls in search of final blessing often came to the temple of a powerful Hindu goddess in Calcutta. But nearby, many discovered another source of solace: a small woman, wrinkled and bent, a willing companion to the dying. She tenderly cared for the abandoned and the sick, washing their wounds, soothing their sores, preparing them for death. "They must feel wanted, loved," Mother Teresa said. "They are Jesus for me."

Only physically did Mother Teresa's heart fail her, subjecting her to years of illness that finally led to her death last week at age 87. She had always been adamant about who owned her heart. "People think we are social workers," she once told one of her spiritual advisers, Father Edward Le Joly. "We are not. We serve Jesus. I serve Jesus 24 hours a day."

She was true to her master through the obscurity in which she first labored, through the acclaim that began in the 1960s, through the sometimes heated denunciation that ensued when she defended controversial church teachings on contraception. She was not some saintly relic but a willing servant of her God: "I am like a little pencil in [God's] hand. He does the thinking. He does the writing. The pencil has only to be allowed to be used."

For those who believed and perhaps even for those who merely admired her, Mother Teresa was a living saint, drawing both rich and poor to her side and to the message of God. She could, wrote Malcolm Muggeridge in his 1971 book Something Beautiful for God, "hear in the cry of every abandoned child the cry of the Bethlehem child; recognize in every leper's stumps the hands which once touched sightless eyes and made them see."

Saints--like princesses popularly invested with the image of goodness--are even more powerful in death. Those who loved Mother Teresa have long been murmuring hopeful prayers for her official canonization in the Roman Catholic Church she served so faithfully. That may not be imminent, but for many, there can be no doubting it, no devil able to advocate otherwise. Already, her humble ways and the grand religious enterprise she founded are worthy of veneration and emulation.

The woman who became Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on Aug. 26, 1910, the daughter of a prosperous, ethnic Albanian business contractor in Skopje, now the capital of Macedonia. When she was seven, her father Nicholas died during what may have been a Balkan ethnic brawl. She would always be silent about her early life, but she told Muggeridge she had a vocation to serve the poor from the time she was 12. At 18, Agnes joined Ireland's Sisters of Loreto and took the name Teresa in honor of the French saint Therese of Lisieux, renowned for her piety, goodness and unflinching courage in the face of illness and early death.

After a brief period in Rathfarnham, where she learned English at the order's abbey, Sister Teresa sailed for India. She spent the next 17 years as a teacher and then principal of a Calcutta high school for privileged Bengali girls. It was on Sept. 10, 1946, during a train ride to Darjeeling for a religious retreat, that Teresa received a "call within a call" in which she felt God directed her to the slums. "The message was quite clear," she told colleagues. "I was to leave the convent and help the poor whilst living among them. It was an order."