 |
| Author Susan Conroy and Mother Teresa in Calcutta in 1986, viewing drawings Mother Teresa had requested she make for her during Conroy’s time as a volunteer.
Photo provided |
By Carol Baass Sowa
Today's Catholic
SAN ANTONIO - When Susan Conroy first dreamed of going to Calcutta and working with Mother Teresa in her Home for the Dying, it seemed a very remote possibility. But in 1986, the summer between her junior and senior years at Dartmouth College, she found herself traveling halfway around the world into an experience that would impact her life forever and ultimately lead to authoring a book: “Mother Teresa ? Lessons of Love & Secrets of Sanctity.”
Traveling to India would have been out of the question had Conroy not approached the Tucker Foundation at Dartmouth, which financially assists student community service projects. At first stunned by her proposal ? usual projects being work in area soup kitchens, homeless shelters and the like, they allowed Conroy to set up a first-time program to spend a summer assisting Mother Teresa in her work among the poorest of the poor in India.
The seeds for this dream-fulfilling journey were planted years before, as Conroy had learned the beauty of service at an early age, watching how her parents lovingly cared for each other and for their 10 children. “Your upbringing serves as sort of a natural springboard into the world,” mused Conroy in an interview preceding her visit to San Antonio for a Thursday, Oct. 15 presentation of her book at Villa de San Antonio. “So what you learn at home, you then bring forth into the world.”
It was Conroy’s mother who unintentionally led her to Mother Teresa, sending her off-at-college daughter a page from a magazine with a brightly colored painting of Mother Teresa and a reflection by her on joy. Describing joy as “the net of love by which we can catch souls,” the saintly foundress of the Missionaries of Charity, went on to note: “We all long for heaven where God is, but we have it in our power to be in heaven with Him right now,” and ended with the words “and touching Him in His distressing disguise of the poor.”
Conroy, then a sophomore, taped the page to the wall of her room for inspiration. Home from college on Christmas break, she then came across three little books by Mother Teresa her mother had ordered and found herself absorbing them “like a thirsty flower soaking up the refreshing rain.”
Reading that Mother Teresa welcomed “anyone with hands to serve and a heart to love,” the idea of someday working beside the books’ author to serve the desperately needy, began to take root, leading eventually to the sponsorship that sent her off to Calcutta, a place aptly described as a “black hole,” teeming with wretched poverty and human suffering.
In preparation, Conroy tried to learn as much as she could about her chosen destination from books, documentaries and others who had been there. What she learned was disturbing, but she did not let this dissuade her from her dream. The only encouragement a young Indian student she spoke with could offer her was a solemn, “Don’t die over there.”
Her parents were horrified at the thought of their daughter going into such danger and her distraught mother, who had recently been diagnosed with cancer, pleaded with her not to go. Conroy’s resolve briefly wavered at the thought of causing her beloved parents pain but, believing in her heart that God was calling her there, she continued with her plans.
Conroy faced her deepest moment of fear early on. Her plane arrived in Calcutta in the middle of the night and there was no one to meet her. She would later learn that, due to the unreliable mail system there, her original letter had never arrived and no one knew she was coming! The next morning, speaking not a world of Hindi or Bengali, she set out to find Mother Teresa’s convent, luckily looking so conspicuously out of place that bystanders began calling out, “Mother Teresa!” and pointing her in the right direction.
The stench-filled streets, she would recall, teemed with life both day and night, overflowing with a suffering mass of humanity, thousands of whom live ? and die ? on the streets themselves. “I had never seen so many grotesquely maimed figures as I saw in Calcutta,” Conroy writes in her book. “There were so many bodies with missing limbs ? so many twisted, frightful figures.”
After finding her way to Mother Teresa’s, Conroy found herself immediately pitching in to help, with no training. In the mornings she would work at the Children’s Home, helping care for the hundreds of unwanted babies and needy children, suffering from a variety of infections and hungry for love as well as food.
In the afternoons, she tended to the men and women at the Home for the Dying, comforting and cleaning bodies so malnourished they resembled living skeletons. She went also with the sisters in their ambulance to retrieve dying destitutes off the streets, so they could at least die in some comfort and with dignity.
Sometimes all she could do was lovingly hold their suffering bodies, and she remembers the disfigured man who peacefully died in her arms just as Mother Teresa entered the room. She helped Conroy close the man’s eyes and gently fold his arms, saying to her, “You have received many graces for this.”
Returning home at the end of the summer proved to be more of a culture shock to Conroy than her arrival in India. Fortunately, the foundation that had sponsored her trip required students to write a 10-page paper on their service work. “I was forced to sit down and process what I had just experienced,” she said, “what I had learned and how I grew and what had happened over there.” It was therapeutic.
There were two aspects of returning home that she found particularly difficult to cope with. One was America’s wastefulness and she cringed at seeing farmers on television dumping tons of milk because they could not get a good price for it. “I had just been lifting people out of gutters, emaciated people that were hungry, digging through heaps of trash looking for something to eat,” she said ruefully.
Likewise, coming from a place where even “treated” water was full of organisms and the air densely polluted, she wanted people to be aware of the many blessing here they take for granted. “Even if you’re not going to serve others,” she wanted to tell them, “at least thank God for the millions of blessings here in America!”
Conroy returned to her senior year at college, no longer interested in her major of economics, but feeling she should finish what she had started. Returning to classes also gave her life needed structure, as she can continued to process her transformative time in Calcutta.
Following graduation, she worked first for a children’s cancer program, a natural outgrowth of her work in India, before returning to work briefly again with Mother Teresa in 1991. At Mother Teresa’s urging she spent two weeks at the order’s convent in South Bronx, New York, to discern if she had a religious vocation, but felt she was not being called this way. The two continued correspondence until Mother Teresa’s death.
Casting about for employment, Conroy looked for work in her degree field and found work as a tax specialist and financial analyst, while continuing to give talks in the area on her experiences in Calcutta. The employees at an insurance company she spoke to were so moved by her presentation, they encouraged her to write her book, which she did, with Mother Teresa’s blessing, though doubtful at first as she had never considered herself a writer.
The book became a best-seller, extending the scope of her presentations to the national and international level. Conroy takes heart in noting that while her dear Mother Teresa has passed on to heaven, the order she founded is thriving and continuing the work she began. And, she relates, “I still find young people coming up to me and asking, ‘Can you prepare me for a trip to Calcutta?’”
Conroy carries with her, in all she does, what she learned at Mother Teresa’s side. Two things in particular stand out for her.
The first is to do small things with great love. “She’d remind us,” said Conroy, “at the end of our lives we will not be judged on how much money we made, what kind of car we drove, or how many degrees we earned. At the end of our lives, we will be judged on love ? on how well we have put our love into living action.”
Second, is the importance of prayer, which she recalls Mother Teresa saying “enlarges the heart and makes it capable of containing God’s gift of himself.” “She lived those words,” said Conroy.
Susan Conroy will speak on her work and relationship with Mother Teresa Thursday, Oct. 15, at 2 p.m., in a free lecture at Villa de San Antonio, 8103 North Hollow. Space is limited and reservations can be made by calling (210) 558-7600.