The Danger of Abortion to the Family by Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Today on the feast day of Mother Teresa, I share her prophetic words regarding the family.

"If there is so much disturbance in the world today, if there is so much sadness, so much killing and anxiety, it is because the family is no longer united...
father against mother, children against children...
a mother committing a murder in her own womb,
a mother who is afraid of her own child,
afraid to have to love one more child,
so afraid that she must kill that child-
the child must die so that she may live,
so that she may be free.
If a mother can kill her own child, what is there to stop others from killing one another?"

- from The Best Gift is Love.

Quotable Mother Teresa

I hope you are enjoying these series of photos of quotes.  I often jot down pearls of wisdom in my journal, I find when doing spiritual reading.  Thought pairing them with the countless photos I take would be a good idea.

As always, please click on photo so you can read the quote.

Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta

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JOY

 "The world today is hungry for the joy that comes from a pure heart, for a pure heart can see God."

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DEATH

"There is no need to fear death, because death is nothing more than going home to God.  For me, that is the greatest development of a human life:  to die in peace with God."

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FRIENDSHIP

"No one can make a better friend than Jesus- because His love is so humble and so tender..."

Excerpts from The Best Gift is Love

Saintly Quote - Kindness

In Honor of What Would Have Been Blessed Mother Teresa's 100th Birthday

One way the women in our family are honoring Mother Teresa (born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu) is by wearing blue and white. Today, I am wearing a blue shirt and white shorts.
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"...The pure heart can easily see Christ in the hungry, in the naked, in the homeless, in the unwanted, in the unloved, in the leper, in the alcoholic..."

"Naturally our joy will be complete if we remain in His love- for His love is personal, intimate, real, living delicate, faithful love..."

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"...God's hunger for human love, for human care, for human touch, for that human joy of loving and touching- that is why He became man: to be able to be loved by you and me."

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"There is no need to fear death, because death is nothing more than going home to God. .."

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"No one can make a better friend than Jesus- because His love is so humble and so tender..."

 "Faith is the most beautiful gift God can give to a human being- to believe that He IS, and that Christ IS..."

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"Talk to God. Just let Jesus pray in you."

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Quote source: The Best Gift is Love: Meditations by Mother Teresa.

Blessed Mother Teresa's Quotes - Abortion

In Memory of Mother Teresa: Her Quotes About Abortion

"America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men.

It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts -- a child -- as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters"

And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners.

Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign." (Mother Theresa -- "Notable and Quotable," Wall Street Journal, 2/25/94, p. A14)

"But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child - a direct killing of the innocent child - murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?

How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love, and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts.

Jesus gave even his life to love us. So the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love - that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts.

By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. And by abortion, the father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world.

That father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion. Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want.

That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion. " "Please don't kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted, and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child, and be loved by the child.

From our children's home in Calcutta alone, we have saved over 3,000 children from abortions. These children have brought such love and joy to their adopting parents, and have grown up so full of love and joy!"

February 1997 - National Prayer Breakfast in Washington attended by the President and the First Lady. "What is taking place in America," she said, "is a war against the child. And if we accept that the mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another."

"Any country that accepts abortion, is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what it wants." "It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish."

Shared bySue

The Paradoxical Commandments and the Mother Theresa Connection

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.


A big mahalo to Sisters Suzanne and Maurice of Holy Family Home in Osaka, Japan and Elizabeth Keith, for sharing this story with my family.

Personally, this was one of my "favorite quotes" by Mother Theresa. It was only after recently speaking to mutual friends of the Keiths, Sister of Charity sisters Suzanne and Maurice, as well as Mrs. Elizabeth Keith, who we had the pleasure of meeting last night, that we learned who the original author was and the interesting story behind it.


Source: Kent M. Keith

I'm sure most of you are familiar with the foregoing "commandments" and if you are like most people, you have attributed this work to Mother Theresa of Calcutta.

However, Kent M. Keith wrote it when he was a 19 year old student at Harvard.

The Paradoxical Commandments were written by Kent M. Keith when he was 19, a sophomore at Harvard College. He wrote them as part of a book for student leaders entitled The Silent Revolution: Dynamic Leadership in the Student Council, published by Harvard Student Agencies in 1968. The Paradoxical Commandments subsequently spread all over the world, and have been used by millions of people.

Mother Teresa, or one of her co-workers, put the Paradoxical Commandments up on the wall of Mother Teresa's children's home in Calcutta. That fact was reported in a book compiled by Lucinda Vardey, Mother Teresa: A Simple Path, which was published in 1995. As a result, some people have attributed the Paradoxical Commandments to Mother Teresa.

As Kent explains in his book, Do It Anyway: The Handbook for Finding Personal Meaning and Deep Happiness in a Crazy World:
"I found out about it in September 1997 at my Rotary Club meeting. We usually begin each meeting with a prayer or a thought for the day, and a fellow Rotarian of mine got up and noted that Mother Teresa had died, and said that, in her memory, he wanted to read a poem she had written that was titled "Anyway." I bowed my head in contemplation, and was astonished to recognize what he read–it was eight of the original ten Paradoxical Commandments."

"I went up after the meeting and asked him where he got the poem. He said it was in a book about Mother Teresa, but he couldn't remember the title. So the next night I went to a bookstore and started looking through the shelf of books about the life and works of Mother Teresa. I found it, on the last page before the appendices in Mother Teresa: A Simple Path. The Paradoxical Commandments had been reformatted to look like a poem, and they had been retitled "Anyway." There was no author listed, but at the bottom of the page, it said: "From a sign on the wall of Shishu Bhavan, the children's home in Calcutta."

"Mother Teresa, or one of her coworkers, thought that the Paradoxical Commandments were important enough to put up on the wall at their children's home, to look at, day after day, as they ministered to the children. That really hit me. I wanted to laugh, and cry, and shout–and I was getting chills up and down my spine. Perhaps it hit me hard because I had a lot of respect for Mother Teresa, and perhaps because I knew something about children's homes. Whatever the reason, it had a huge impact on me. That was when I decided to speak and write about the Paradoxical Commandments again, thirty years after I first wrote them."