International Day of Charity

Charity will never end (Corinthians 1:8)

Since 2012, on this Day called for by the United Nations General Assembly, we celebrate the endless charity witnessed by Mother Teresa of Calcutta. In her – foundress, in 1950, of the Missionaries of Charity – we find the ‘Call within the Call’, that is, the yearning to care for the ‘poorest of the poor’ and all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for by society, who survive on the margins, in what today we would call the extreme existential peripheries.  This ‘Call within the Call’ Mother Teresa felt it in India where she had arrived at the age of 19: it was 1946 when, on the evening of 10 September, she left by train to go to Darjeeling for ten days of spiritual exercises. It was on that night’s journey, in contact with conditions of extreme poverty, that ‘I opened my eyes to suffering and fully understood the essence of my vocation […] I felt that the Lord was asking me to give up the quiet life within my religious congregation to go out into the streets to serve the poor. It was an order. It was not a suggestion, an invitation or a proposal.’ (Source: Renzo Allegri, Mother Teresa told me, Ancora Editrice, Milan, 2010). Today, that date, 10 September, is celebrated by the Missionaries of Charity as Inspiration Day.

Image: www.adoa.it

In Mother Teresa, an Albanian by birth, but naturalised Indian, we find the radical integration of action and contemplation, of spirit and flesh, proper to St Paul’s Hymn to Charity (Corinthians 13: 1-13), which many also know as the Hymn to Love. In the spiritual and existential journey of this little great missionary of charity we find confirmation that Pauline teaching is more than a celebration of the love that blossoms between two people: in this text love is an expression of faith, of trust in a world torn apart and marked by violence.

Photo: www.carmeloveneto.it

Nella consapevolezza che lo stile della carità-missione somiglia “a un canto dolce, una lampadina che si accende, un passo lento ma costante, silenzioso, una carezza che, chinato il capo, con la guancia si vuol trattenere.” (Fonte: https://www.caritastarvisina.it/giornata-internazionale-della-carita/) ...oggi più che mai urge trasformare i cuori di pietra in cuore di carne.

NOI del BP ci proviamo quotidianamente,
sulle orme dei Fondatori riattualizzate nelle Posizioni di Congregazione,
ispirate anche dall’anelito di Madre Teresa.