Such a Vision of the Street

...Mother Teresa emerges throughout this long book as a saint whom people long to see...

...A favorite vignette is of Andrew Young and Mother Teresa singing together "Lead Kindly Light" in her first foundation in the South Bronx...

...There is a concept in India that the very sight of a holy person, the darshan, brings a blessing...

...The decisive step, she has often said, is picking up the first dying person off the street...

...Her faith in God is rock-like, her compassion boundless, her simplicity and lack of vanity absolute...

...In Eileen Egan's excellent biography, Mother Teresa's critics are represented...

...Eliot wrote in "Preludes," the source of the biography's title, of someone who "had such a vision of the street as the street hardly understands...

...of her father who was murdered for his fidelity to the cause of Albanian nationalism...

...Eileen Egan is wonderfully deft at the quick and revealing profile: we see and hear Dorothy Day, Jean Vanier, Dom Helder Camara, and Mahatma Gandhi, and the revolutionary simplicity of each makes this biography read at times like a treatise on the community of saints, the common resonances of these God-drenched souls...

...of her mother who when left a penniless widow with three young children pulled herself together and set up a business of handcrafting embroidery and selling cloth...

...If the details of this foundation and that crisis sometimes become repetitious and boring, that is the nature of poverty — it is profoundly monotonous — and this is as much a biography of poverty and its dayto-day relief as it is of a personality...

...The impact of this luminous and exhaustive book is such that one laughs at the end to realize that still, for many, Mother Teresa is simply a conservative Catholic of small significance...

...It is her univocal stand on abortion that explains, in part, the failure of some to catch the revolutionary and mystical tenor of her commitment...

...Two American nuns have classified her in the press as ' 'pre-Vatican II," a holy person doing a work that fails to address systemic evils such as defense spending...

...Camus, whose address on receiving his Nobel Prize is excerpted in Egan's fine last chapter, understood compassion as practiced "one, by one, by one": Some say that hope lies in a nation...

...Institutional friends such as Food For Peace, Catholic Relief Services, and Church World Service are represented too, not simply with statistics but by case histories of those they help, who are most often women and children...

...Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Albania, she is very much an Albanian in the way her life reflects an aspect of Albanian identity called besa, a word that refers to the Albanian concept of the absolute sacredness of the word of honor, the inviolability of the pledged word in daily life...

...She has been blamed, too, for having been used by the media as a model for Sisters in the United States, cast in the safe old image of the caring and sharing woman-on-apedestal...

...During the same years when traditional religious institutions were losing their members, the numbers of Mother Teresa's followers have increased steadily...

...I believe, rather, that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals, whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history...

...Since that day in 1948 the lone "cracked" nun has become an international celebrity and won a Nobel Prize...

...The biographer has also been faithful to her subject...

...Incidents revealing her utter and incredible trust in providence abound...

...Without question she is God's instrument...

...Fighting cutbacks by testifying on behalf of the poor at the hearings of politicians is part of Mother Teresa's mission, the reason for much of her traveling...

...Such is the fairness of Eileen Egan's presentation of Mother Teresa that at her story's end, we who disagree with her about abortion must acknowledge that our disagreement more likely signals a failure of our understanding and vision than of hers...

...others in a man...

...As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever-threatened truth that each and every person . . . builds for all...

...On certain ideological highgrounds, however, her mission is still not taken seriously, though ideologues do not use words like "crackpot...

...When Mother Teresa remarked once (to Mark Hatfield), "I am not called to be successful but to be faithful," the remark bore a religious conviction strongly colored by her Albanian and family legacy...

...Of her duty to meet the press (because they make people aware of the poor), Mother Teresa says, "For me it is more difficult than bathing a leper...

...To catch just a glimpse of Gandhi, thousands would wait for hours in sweltering heat...

...Her critics dispute the works of mercy performed by her and her sister Missionaries of Charity, calling them palliatives which actually block change by enabling unjust socio-political structures to stay in place...

...against terrible odds her work for the poor and sick and dying thrives...

...Mother Teresa has the native toughness of a people that for centuries resisted their Moslem occupiers...

...Malcolm Muggeridge's friendship with Mother Teresa is presented along with the many friends she has made on her travels...

...Though selfless, she is not with20 September 1985: 503 out personality...

...somehow the money comes in, though she forbids the solicitation of funds...

...T.S...

...Her determination to do the work she believes God has called her to do comes through in its prominent strong lines especially when she is seen in relation to other men and women possessed of a similar will, some of whom have been her friends and/or mentors...

...The inhumanity of cutbacks in governmental appropriations for famine relief programs is also shown in a flesh-and-blood as well as a statistical context...

...When asked at the Nobel Prize ceremony if she is ever overwhelmed by the numbers of the poor, Mother Teresa replied, "No, one, by one, by one...

...In specific and comprehensive detail she has described the works and places of justice and mercy as exercised by Mother Teresa and the order she founded, Missionaries of Charity...

...So said a Yugoslavian Jesuit of his own and his colleagues' reaction when Mother Teresa abandoned the walls and the habit of the Sisters of Loreto, put on a sari and sandals, and with a packet containing five rupees and her lunch, walked into the alleyways of Calcutta to serve the poorest of the poor...