I moved with my family to Calcutta (Kolkata), India last year. “Vibrant” does not begin to describe it. The city is a sensory overload — sights, sounds and smells that I could not have imagined before experiencing them. Called the “City of Joy,” it is that. Wealth, success, culture, education, nurturing families, world-class healthcare — all here in abundance. But if there is a place that better illustrates the confronting contrasts of the human condition, I’ve not heard of it. Death, sickness, despair, crushing poverty, abandonment — all here in abundance.

It was out of this cauldron of chaos, as some call it, that one of the 20th century’s greatest figures emerged: Mother Teresa. This Albanian nun had moved to Calcutta as a young schoolteacher. After seeing the dark abyss of suffering in her new home, she had what she described as a “call within a call” that changed her life, and the world. She was on a train from Calcutta to Darjeeling, in the foothills of the Himalayas, for a retreat in 1946. Jesus appeared to her: “My little one, come, come carry me into the holes of the poor. Come, be my light. I cannot go alone; they don’t know me, so they don’t want me. You come, go amongst them, carry me with you into them. How I long to enter their holes, their dark, unhappy homes.”

With that calling she established the Missionaries of Charities in 1950 and opened homes for the dying, orphaned, disabled and sick. In 1979 Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her work. She passed away in Calcutta in 1997. In September this year Pope Francis said at the canonization of her sainthood, “Mercy was the salt which gave flavor to her work, it was the light which shone in the darkness of the many who no longer had tears to shed for their poverty and suffering. May she be your model of holiness.”

Advent is the season of expectation and preparation. It is a profound story of people waiting in darkness for the coming of the light. I am thinking this year about my role in the story. Jesus has called me to share God’s light with people in darkness. I want, like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, to be Jesus to people in need, shining a light in dark places.

– Dr. Craig Hall
Palm Beach Atlantic Class of 1987
U.S. Consul General, Kolkata, India