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 parents.
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.
Wenceslaus Anthony wrote the above article (edited) in our October 1, 2015 issue. He was Chairman of the Mother Teresa Interfaith Committee which a few of us established in 2010 to pay tribute to the Saint of Kolkata. We will continue to work as a Committee, paying additional tribute to Mr Anthony.
