Wenceslaus Anthony –
Where and how does love begin?
I believe that love begins with prayer.
Praying together has to begin early in life.
The best place for children to learn how to love and to pray is in the family, seeing and experiencing the love and prayer of their patents.
When families are broken or disunited, children are likely to grow up not knowing how to love and pray. This is how they turn to drugs or other things to escape feeling unloved and rejected.
But when families are strong and united, children can see God’s special love in the love of their parents and can grow to make their home a loving and prayerful place.
The child is God’s best gift to the family and needs both mother and father because each one shows God’s love in a special way.
The family that prays together stays together, and if they stay together they will love one another as God has loved each one of them.
Mother’s wish
Mother Teresa wanted us to keep the joy of loving in our hearts and share this joy with all.
The world today is full of suffering but prayer brings unity in the family.
Mother Teresa wanted us to make a strong resolution that we will teach our children to pray and pray with them. We will see the joy and peace that will come into our heart and into our home when we pray together.
She continues to add that the fruit of prayer is the deepening of faith.
Tender Love
The fruit of faith is love and the fruit of love is service and the fruit of service is peace and the works of Love is Peace.
Mother Teresa said that we bring that tender love of God into our hearts and into the hearts of everyone we meet. God has created each one of us, every human being, for greater things, to Love and to be loved.
God has given each of us His gift. All gifts of God are good, but they are not all the same.
“What I can do, you cannot. What you can do, I cannot. But together we can do something beautiful for God,” Mother Teresa used to say to people who tell her that they would like to serve the poor as she does.
Fearsome hunger
There is a terrible hunger in the world for love.
All of us experience pain and loneliness and must have the courage to recognise them.
Poverty, which is not always related to wealth, may exist in our own families. Absence of passion and love towards the unfortunate is in essence poverty itself. We must learn to love and serve the poor.
We can thus do something beautiful for God and pray together as a family.
Prayer gives a clean heart and a clean heart can see God. And if you see God in each other, have the joy of seeing God in each other, we will love one another.
That is why colour, religion, nationality and other differences should never come between us. For, we are all the same children of the same loving hand of God, created for greater things, including to love and be loved.
We must experience that joy of loving.
Compassionate couple
Mother Teresa used to speak about a young couple who once offered her a large sum of money.
She asked, “Where did you get so much money?”
They replied, “Two days ago we got married. Before marriage, we decided that we will not buy wedding clothes. We will not have a wedding feast. We will give you that money.”
Mother Teresa knew what that meant in India, especially in a Hindu family – not to have wedding clothes, not to have a wedding feast.
She asked, “But why? Why did you do like that?”
They replied, “We loved each other so much that we wanted to share the joy of loving with the people you serve.”
Mother Teresa said this is the experience of the joy of loving, by giving until it hurts.
She said that she was asked in one of the countries, “What are you going to do in this place? We have everything. The government gives us everything. What will you do here?”
She replied “I will give tender love and care.”
No money can give that.
She said that we must begin with that tender love and care in our own home, the purpose for which we were created.
We have many poor people around the world, but Mother Teresa said that the poverty of loneliness, the poverty of being unwanted, unloved, uncared, just left, a throwaway of society, is a very difficult and very, very burdensome poverty, very difficult to remove.
Let us bring again and again prayer into our life. For it is prayer that will give us strength to Love and to give till it hurts.
Wenceslaus Anthony is Chairman of Mother Teresa Interfaith Committee.
Photo: Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa Interfaith Annual Meeting
Guest Speaker: Dr Jebamalai Vinanchiarachi, Former Principal Advisor to Director General, United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO). Subject: The Impact and Compact of thirsting love for humanity.
Catholic Church of Christ the King
260 Richardson Road, Mt Roskill Auckland
Saturday, November 21, 2015 at 2 pm
