Dr Matt’s Newsletter April 15th 2023–Mother Teresa's story, part 4: “Mother’s Mother”
Supporting healthy social interactions and diversity of health choices
Fun News of the Week: On Tuesday April 11th, I visited Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity home for “Terminally ill homeless” in Northeast Washington DC.
The residents there are no longer homeless, because they can stay for as long as they like. Interestingly, the vast majority are also not really “terminally ill”; the sisters excellent care has seen to that. My host, Sister Superior Marie Joel, told me something even more interesting: all the residents and sisters “got covid”. However, despite the residents having very fragile health, not a single one of them died from it.
Perhaps the next Dr Matt patient-family community building event can be a volunteer project at this quiet home on a hill. The sisters rely on volunteers for as much as possible, including taking care of residents, cooking, serving, washing dishes, maintaining buildings, and landscaping. So… there is something for everyone 😊
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Yours truly, one moment at a time.
Matt Irwin
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Today’s newsletter sections include:
Music of the Week – Sister nuns in Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity sing to a very lucky woman who has been given food, clothing, shelter, and tender loving care. Another group of nuns made an album of beautiful hymns that was #1 in classical music in 2012, and as a final gift, Thich Nhat Hahn speaks about the “Violin inside all of us”.
Research of the week – Dr Matt Visits Mother Teresa’s Home, “Gift of Peace”, in Washington DC – a very fun place to volunteer your time, energy, and spirit, without fear of “superbugs”.
Last but not least, another story from Mother Teresa’s biography, “To Love and Be Loved” by Jim Towey. “Mother’s Mother” –Mother Teresa had a wonderful Mother who raised her until the age of 18 when Teresa, then known as Gonxha, answered a spiritual calling to become a nun. Sadly, they never saw each other again due to the communist totalitarian government that took over Albania in 1946.
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Music of the week – Sisters of Missionaries of Charity sing to very lucky woman…, and Thich Nhat Hahn on the “Violin inside all of us”.
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Missionaries of Charity soothe a very ill woman with singing. I did not see any actual singing in my visit, but I did see the tenderness and bright spirits of the nuns and volunteers who take care of the residents there.
Thich Nhat Hahn – A lesson on the “violin inside all of us” and how mindful present-moment music allows us to see clearly through conflicting emotions.
Here is a quote as an introduction:
“There are moments when many mental formations want to manifest at the same time. Your jealousy wants to speak. Your fear wants to speak. Your anger wants to speak. And your mindfulness wants to speak also! It’s like a group of people and they all want to talk at the same time. It happens… and you are not peaceful…
“In that moment, when you’re not peaceful, you can play music. You can say to your mental formations ‘Listen, everyone, you will have a chance to express yourself. But now let’s listen to some music.’ And you play the music – the music of mindful breathing.
“Like a violin, it can be very soft very soothing, and everyone will be happy. You have the violin, but you have to make use of your instrument”.
To listen as you read the section below on Mother Teresa, here is a selection from the Sisters in the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles, from their album of hymns entitled Advent at Ephesus
Research of the Week: Dr Matt Visits Mother Teresa’s Home in Washington DC –a very fun place to volunteer and perhaps have the next Dr Matt Patient-family community building event.
While reading Jim Towey’s biography, he kept mentioning an AIDS home in DC that he lived at for extended periods, but no matter how I tried, I could not find it. Finally on page 98 he used it’s official title, “Gift of Peace” which was the clue I needed. Imagine my surprise when I saw that it is in an area of DC where I have been doing home hospice visits for the past year!
I called and spoke to Sister Superior Marie Joel, introducing myself as a hospice doctor in their neighborhood. They have a good relationship with hospice care and she invited me to come over the next day for a visit. She complained that hospices would sometimes not admit some of their residents whose health was failing. She said “It is very helpful to have weekly nursing visits”.
As my previous stories on April 9th, April 2nd, and March 25th made clear, Mother Teresa and her sisters love to take care of people with the most frightening illnesses. In the first few decades the sisters logged over 4 million visits with people diagnosed with leprosy, and possibly a similar number with tuberculosis. When AIDS came along in the 1980’s they were prepared, and they knew that these people would be like “modern day lepers”. They also knew that caring for them would be safer than people thought, and in fact there was a type of hysteria at that time.
When the home in DC was started, there was great resistance. Towey writes “Gift of Peace almost didn’t open because of hostility from its neighbors and the DC Government”. People were frightened that AIDS would spread from the facility, even though it is on 20 acres of uninhabited land. One neighbor expressed the fear that mosquitoes could carry AIDS from Gift of Peace into the surrounding homes, and made this case to the city zoning board. In the end a “loophole” prevented the zoning board from stopping them.
But back to my visit this week, after introducing me to several sisters, volunteers, and residents, Sister Marie Joel sat down and asked me about my hospice work. She told me of their difficulties getting people admitted to hospice. I promised to help, of course, and gave her my cell and private office number. Then she gave me a “walking tour”, and I met about thirty residents, about ten nuns, and about ten volunteers.
I made a point to ask Sister Marie Joel what the residents were like when they first came to Gift of Peace. I knew that they had all been homeless, and also ill with something that seemed incurable because these are the only people they accept. She enjoyed describing different residents: long wild hair, scruffy beards, and unkempt clothing. Many of them had had toes amputated in the past due to gangrene, but the wounds had healed by now, and they are able to walk using the toes that remain in place. In past times, and perhaps still in poorer areas of India, many of these people would have been diagnosed with leprosy. After all, they did not even start using microscopes until around 1900 and even with this modern marvel it is difficult to really blame a specific bacteria in most wounds. Perhaps the terrain is more important than the germ, whether it is the leprosy bacteria or other more common bacteria.
Near the end of our visit I remarked that she and her sisters are not very frightened by scary illnesses like tuberculosis, AIDS, leprosy, and covid-19. She said with a slightly mischievous smile: "All of us had covid”. I asked, “All of you?” She said “Yes, every resident and all the sisters, too… but none of us died”. At that point we shared a hearty chuckle: we both know the power of tender loving care, as do the parents of children all over the world 😊.
I am not sure about their vaccine status, but as my avid readers know, multiple studies have shown that “covid vaccines” actually INCREASE people’s chance of testing positive on the “covid tests”. This was reviewed in two prior newsletters: January 18, 2023 (along with Willie Nelson’s classic “Still Not Dead Again Today”), and November 9th, 2022, along with a fun talk by Thich Nhat Hanh about looking inside ourselves rather than pointing out the “speck of dust in our neighbor’s eye”.
After my visit at Gift of peace, I went to two hospice home visits within a mile of the home. Both families had lived more than forty years in the neighborhood, but , remarkably, neither one of them knew that Mother Teresa's order of nuns had a home for homeless people nearby. One of them said "I have passed it many times, and I saw it was a religious building, but I had no idea there were forty formerly homeless people living there!" I commented to both of them that the sisters like to keep a very low profile, and we also shared a chuckle :-)
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Part 4 from Mother Teresa’s biography, “To Love and Be Loved” by Jim Towey: Mother’s Mother.
Mother Teresa‘s own mother, Drana gave birth to her on August 26, 1910, in what is today North Macedonia. Her mother was a very religious and disciplined woman who also earned a reputation for aiding and caring for the poor. She explained to her children that the poor were also part of their family.
Mother Teresa‘s father assisted his wife’s generosity, but he had a tragic end that Mother Teresa witnessed when she was only eight years old. He was working to help Albania be independent from Turkish rule, and his advocacy led to him being poisoned. She last saw her dying father when a priest came to their home to anoint him with the Sacrament of the Sick just before he was taken to the hospital.
After this, life became hard for Mother Teresa and her family. Her mother worked long hours making handcrafted embroidery to provide for them, and she still aided the poor who continued to come looking for assistance. People in the community knew their home as a place where the needy would be welcomed.
When Mother Teresa was 18 years old she decided to answer a spiritual calling and become a nun. You can imagine how her mother felt, knowing her beloved daughter would be living half-way around the world. I imagine she had a mix of tremendous pride and tremendous sadness, which is what I would feel if my daughter gave me news like this.
Jim Towey writes that Mother Teresa “knew her choice to leave home would be a heavy cross for her mother to bear. But her mother gave her blessing“. Drana knew she would not see her daughter for many years, but even she did not imagine that they would never see each other again. A communist dictatorship seized control of Albania in 1946, causing the “Iron Curtain” to fall between them. People were not allowed to leave the country without special permission from the government, which was extremely difficult to get, and visitors had similar limits. Just as the communist Chinese see the Dalai Lama as an intolerable threat to their authority, Mother Teresa was unwelcome and banned from entry. Even letters between mother and daughter had to be smuggled across the border, and there was a period of 9 years when no communication got through.
Can you imagine living in a country where you are not allowed to leave, or even exchange letters with your own daughter, who is a catholic nun? This was a sad reality that eastern Europeans, Chinese, and Russians experienced for decades. While many resisted, the majority of people accepted it as “the New Normal“, and many even enthusiastically supported it, based on a shared group-belief that provided a false promise of relief from deep-seated human anxieties that we all share. The intoxicating communist ideal was truly “infectious” as was the obsession with eliminating dissonant voices who pointed out the obvious: the communist economic reality commonly created something worse than poverty: famine and starvation. Unfortunately these utopian ideals tend to make things worse and worse over time, until the opposite of a utopia has been created... Sound familiar?
Mother Teresa’s mother had a deep love for her daughter which never faded despite their many decades apart, and vice-a-versa. Between 1948 and 1957, no mail or letters were able to be exchanged, and her mother thought she had probably died. Jim Towey writes “this period of silence was excruciating for both of them”. When they finally got letters through, her mother wrote “I want to see you before I die. That is the only Grace I ask of god.” On hearing this, Mother Teresa decided she would make every effort to travel back home.
However, despite her pleas, the totalitarian government of Albania would not allow Mother Teresa to visit her mother. Drana died in 1972, but it was not until 1985, after communist dictator Enver Hoxha's death, that Mother Teresa was able to travel to Albania to visit her Mother’s grave.
Although they never saw each other again in physical life, it is likely they had a spiritual reunion. Near Death Experience reports such as Rajiv Parti, the anesthesiologist featured in my newsletter on January 25th (along with beautiful music by Aaron Copland), suggest that our spirits are never actually very far apart.
Thanks for reading Dr Matt’s Newsletter and if you made it this far, I owe you a box of chocolates :-)